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lingua franca


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Definition:
Italian mixed with Arabic, Greek, and Turkish—used by Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians trading with Arabs, Turks, and Greeks. It is the commercial language of Constantinople.

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (footnote) (1726)
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A common language used by people of diverse backgrounds to communicate with one another, often a basic form of speech with simplified grammar.

text from Wiktionary, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike

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Uses:
There were several of his priests and lawyers present (as I conjectured by their habits), who were commanded to address themselves to me; and I spoke to them in as many languages as I had the least smattering of, which were, High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca; but all to no purpose.

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
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Most men have sports as the lingua-franca of dudes. This was the film-geek equivalent to discussing some great play in a famous football game.

Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl, p.276 (2012)
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he realized that the man might speak Swahili, the universal lingua franca of East and Central Africa,

Cecil Scott Forester. The African Queen, p.163 (1935)
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Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralised in any way.

George Orwell. 1984 (1949)
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