The chapter will present the principal sources of Lingua Franca. These fall for the most part into two categories of documentary and literary sources, although, as will become apparent, there is inevitably overlap between the two, and the definition of documentary is questionable when applied to travelogues and memoirs. The more strictly documentary evidence comes from diplomatic sources and in the form of the Dictionnaire (1830), a lexical manual for colonizing French troops published in 1830. Even this source, however, is not without inconsistency and contention, as its author(s) are unknown, as is their experience of and fluency in Lingua Franca. There are numerous omissions from the text as well as multiple errors. The majority of the documentary evidence takes the form of individual accounts of captivity, redemptionist missions and journeys through Barbary. The evidence is fragmentary and often frustrating. A substantial proportion of the sources refer to Lingua Franca and its constituent or lexifying languages, but then offer little or no example of it. This chapter further exposes the linguistic bias of the authors of many sources, recording excerpts that lexically and orthographically belie their native language and their analysis of Lingua Francaās linguistic roots. The predominantly, if not exclusively, oral nature of Lingua Franca only compounds the fragmentary nature of the evidence as it cannot be compared with sources of written text. Yet, given the era of its existence, there are no oral recordings. All documentation of the language is written. The chapter will reveal the sourcesā documentation of the inevitable variation, and yet remarkable constancy, of Lingua Franca across its impressive geographic and diachronic spread.
The already limited corpus of Lingua Franca has been further contracted in more recent years by linguists including Minervini (1996), Selbach (2008) and Dakhlia (2008) all of whom reject earlier scholarsā (Whinnom 1977; Schuchardt 1909, trans. 1980 amongst others) claims that pre-sixteenth-century literary works offer the earliest evidence of Lingua Franca. They also largely dismiss literary examples of Lingua Franca featured in the plays of MoliĆØre, Goldoni and other Venetians as dramatized, exaggerated and unreliable. Much of the documentary corpus, dating from the seventeenth century onwards, comes from travelogues and captivity narratives. Although both Dakhlia (2008) and Selbach (2008) highlight the repetitive and imitative character of the Lingua Franca excerpts reported in these sources, and Dakhlia (2008) identifies the genre of captivity narratives as being explicitly dramatic in character, both maintain a clear distinction between these and the literary sources (Dakhlia 2008: 359ā360). One possible means of analysing the captivity narratives and the travelogues is to consider them more as literary sources. The excerpts of Lingua Franca they offer, which are often paratactic and ritualistic in nature, would consequently be viewed as less linguistically reliable than quotations from diplomatic correspondence and the later lexical source, the Dictionnaire (1830). However, my preference is to examine all the sources as possibly valuable contributions to the small corpus, while exercising caution regarding the intended purpose and audience of the writing. Given that our evidence of Lingua Franca is almost exclusively written representations of oral language (although there may be some elements of it in the written data from the archives of the English chanceries in Barbary and from correspondence in the Hugo Schuchardt Archive), reported Lingua Franca speech in captivity narratives offers a substantial proportion of the examples of the pidgin, particularly those from the seventeenth century. The historian, Linda Colley, states in reference to captivity narratives that āwhile these texts sometimes contain fictional interludes, together of course with a tithe of lies and errors, their overall factual anchorage can usually be ā¦ and has been testedā (Colley 2003: Loc. 474).
The earliest documentation of Lingua Francaāand the more extensive examplesāis literary. Poems, songs and plays all feature characters speaking Lingua Franca as a device. As such, the language, albeit resembling later Lingua Franca in terms of key prominent features, is exaggerated, stylized and deliberately comprehensible to its audience (Minervini 1996: 268). As with the documentary corpus, La lingua franca ĆØ dunque attribuita dai franchi a coloro che franchi non sono āLingua Franca is then attributed by the Franks to those who are not Franksā (Minervini 1996: 270). There is an otherness to the language for all members of society. Both the literary parodies and the quotes of diplomats and travellers focus on the speech of the Moors, Turks, corsairs, slaves and sultans, the other rather than ātheir ownā. Minervini highlights one of the key challenges in studying foreigner talk, namely that mastery of oneās own tongue rarely correlates with the ability to simplify it. Native speakers often distort their own language in response to a foreignerās attempt to speak it (Minervini 1996: 271).
Dakhlia observes that transcriptions of Lingua Franca found in the documentary sources are partial, subject to interpretation by the author of the source and are never neutral (Dakhlia 2008: 329). This despite the fact that these authors predominantly claim to be reporting direct speech, giving their accounts a āliveā and verisimilitudinous character. As Colley points out, many captives, particularly in the seventeenth century, would have had no access to pen nor paper, and their accounts would have been written weeks, months or even years later. Their audiencesāChurch, state, or simply readers seeking a thrilling taleāwould have indubitably influenced the tone, style and fact/fiction balance of their writing (Colley 2003: Loc. 1799). Furthermore, on a more prosaic note:
It is important to get away from the notion that ā¦ captivity narratives can usefully be characterized as either truthful or cruelly mendacious. We all of us convert lifeās crowded, untidy experiences into stories in our own minds, re-arranging awkward facts into coherent patterns as we go along, and omitting episodesā¦ (Colley 2003: Loc. 1815)
This is especially true of accounts of Lingua Franca excerpts. Idiolectal bias, memory and emotional state can all play a role in the lexical and grammatical features related by captives.
Despite the geographical spread, the almost three centuries of Lingua Francaās existence, and the inevitable variation this would entail, sources often concur in their characterization of the pidginās lexifiers, and in the (verbatim) phrases used by its speakers. This highlights the ritualistic nature and limited domains of Lingua Franca for at least its initial phase. De Rocquevilleās late seventeenth century account of the corsairsā injunction to their newly apprehended captives is cited in Dakhlia (2008): estas bonnĆ© forte dios grande faser camino perti non peaur āBe good and strong, God is great, he will show you the way, do not be scaredā (Dakhlia 2008: 352; my translation). Dakhlia also highlights de Fercourtās almost contemporaneous citing, in 1679, of the reassurance offered by Muslims to their recently acquired slaves: No piliar fantasia, Dios grande, mondo cousi, cousi, Dios fera il tuo camino, si venira ventura, ira a casa tua āDonāt delude yourself, God is great, the world is thus, God will show you the way, if fortune comes, you will go homeā (Dakhlia 2008: 352; my translation). Nearly identical is Haedoās version of the Arab mastersā assurance, preserving slavesā hope that they might one day be liberated: non pillar fantasia, dio grande mundo cosi, cosi, si venir ventura, andar a casa tuya ādonāt delude yourself, God is great, the world is thus, if fortune comes, you will go homeā (Haedo 1612: 128; my translation). It is noteworthy that Pierre Dan, a Trinitarian priest (and almost contemporary of Haedo, writing only a couple of decades later) sent from France to secure the liberation of French captives, records a remarkably...