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Revised version of a plenary paper presented at the Hong Kong Association of Applied Linguistics Research Forum, 12 December 2009, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
1.
Origins and examples
The origin of the term 'lingua franca' stems from when Germanic Franks moved into Gaul in the 5th century and adopted the local language, which became known as the language of the Franks, or lingua franca. The term then came to mean an unofficial language of wider communication and was first used in the Levant during the medieval period, when the 'Franks' went on crusades. A derivation from 'frank' gives Arabic its word for foreigner, feringi, of which there are many variants in other languages (Ostler 2005: 407).
As we shall see, lingua francas tend to contain a large number of non-standard forms, so it is interesting that the plural form of lingua franca is, itself technically speaking, non-standard. Lingua franca is from Latin so the 'proper' plural should be linguae francae. If, on the other hand, the term is to be treated as an English word, the 'proper' plural should be linguas franca, as it belongs to that set of compound nouns of which mothers-in-law and attorneys general are much used examples. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, given its provenance, by far the most commonly attested plural form is the grammatically non-standard lingua francas (lingue franche, which is Portuguese, is also sometimes used as the plural form, albeit rarely).
A lingua franca can thus be defined as a common language between people who do not share a mother tongue. A more precise definition of English as a lingua franca is provided by Firth:
A lingua franca is a 'contact language' between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication. (Firth 1996: 240)
This suggests that a lingua franca offers no necessary linguistic advantages to any speaker. With English, of course, this is not the case when English is used as a lingua franca between L1 speakers of English and others. This is a reason why certain scholars view English as a lingua franca with concern, with one referring...