Mediterranean Lingua Franca | |
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sabir | |
Region | Mediterranean basin |
Extinct | 19th century |
primarily Romance-based pidgin
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Dialects |
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Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | pml |
pml.html | |
Glottolog | ling1242 |
Linguasphere | 51-AAB-c |
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language,[1] or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.[2] April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders."[3] Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.[1][3]
Although written representations of, and/or extra-linguistic comments on, LF come from more than one period and more than one area of the Mediterranean, the principal documentation of this contact language is circumscribed by the area of the Maghreb in the period between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century (Cifoletti 1989, 2004; Camus Bergareche 1993; Arends 1998; Couto 2002)