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Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean: Structure and History (1450-1850)

The aim of my PhD project is to describe Lingua Franca (LF). LF is the now extinct, Romance-lexified oral code that arose from cross-cultural contacts in and around the Mediterranean from 1450-1850. This description is to include a tentative grammar of LF, to the extent that this is possible, as well as a description of the contexts in which LF was used. The study is couched in the framework of Pidgin and Creole studies, and aims to contribute to language contact issues.

The corpus consists of both literary and documentary sources from European travelers, slaves, poets and playwrites, spanning half a millenium. There is a vivid mix of genres that seeks to represent LF: songs, poems, theatre pieces, travelogues, and one anonymous dictionary. Since none of the sources can be considered straightforward reflections of LF, these representations must constitute the object of study itself.