lingua francas
Shared communication systems
Lingua francas is the plural of lingua franca, a language used for communication between people who don't share a native tongue.
English serves as the lingua franca of international business and science; Swahili functions similarly across East Africa.
The term comes from a Mediterranean trading pidgin.
At academic conferences, English is the lingua franca regardless of location.
- tonguesOral muscles for speech
- mother tongueLanguage acquired from birth
- native speakerOne who grew up speaking it
- languagesSystems of human communication
- translationsConverted linguistic texts
bilingualism · pidgin · Pali · Akkadian · communication · Sanskrit · Urdu · dialects · spoken word · Latin · English · global English · Tagalog · Old French · multiculturalism · Russian · interlanguage · interpreter
- sociolinguisticssociolinguistics, diglossia, bilingualism, dialects, code-switching
lingua francaslocal dialects
Language variations by geography
minority languages · regional dialects · endangered languages · vernaculars · tribal languages
lingua francasmother tongues
Languages learned from birth
native languages · first languages · native tongues · home languages · ancestral languages
lingua, lingual, linguist, linguistic, linguistics, linguistically, bilingual, multilingual, trilingual