1184. This week, we look at the history of lingua francas, from the original mix of Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Turkish used during the Crusades to today's global English. Plus, we look at whether it's wrong to use "who" for animals, "that" instead of "who" for people, and "whose" for inanimate objects.
1184. This week, we look at the history of lingua francas, from the original mix of Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Turkish used during the Crusades to today's global English. Plus, we look at whether it's wrong to use "who" for animals, "that" instead of "who" for people, and "whose" for inanimate objects.
The lingua franca segment was written by Alexandra Aikhenvald, a Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow at Jawun Research Institute, CQ University in Australia. It originally ran on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today we’ll figure out what a lingua franca is, and then we'll talk about "who" versus "that."
This next segment is by Alexandra Aikhenvald.
When the Crusaders descended upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean at the end of the 11th century, they had to communicate with each other, with traders and with locals.
Many of them spoke different Romance languages: Italian (especially from the then powerful city-states of Venice and Genoa), Provençal, French or the forerunner, Latin.
Most Westerners in southern Europe were French, especially from between Marseilles and Genoa, from where ships and traders sailed towards the Middle East. These Westerners, as a whole, came to be called Franci (Franks, or French) by Arabs and Greeks.
Around the time of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) – and maybe earlier – a mixed language gradually emerged in the eastern Mediterranean, and later spread to the west.
This common language used by the “Franks” and those who traded and fought with them was also known as Sabir. But you might be most familiar with the term Lingua Franca: literally, Franks’ language.
The Frankish language was a mixture of simplified Italian, French and Spanish, with a smattering of Arabic and Turkish, and was in use across the Mediterranean shores in the Middle East until the late 19th century, before it faded away.
Written with lower case, lingua franca refers to any language used between people who have no other language in common.
Lingua francas go back to antiquity.
Sanskrit was a lingua franca through Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the first millennium CE, via trade and religion.
Around the Mediterranean, Greek was a lingua franca from about 300 BCE until about 500 CE, used in trade, literature and education, and in spreading early Christianity.
Between the second and the fourth centuries, standard Latin replaced Greek as the lingua franca of the expanding Catholic Church. Latin took over as the pan-European language of religion, culture and scholarship, and continued well into the 19th century.
From the 17th century, Arabic has been a lingua franca across the Islamic world, connecting communities across Africa and Asia.
That same century, with the rise of France as an economic power, French gradually replaced Latin in many areas as the first “global” lingua franca of politics, diplomacy, trade and education. French was the language of royal courts; scholars, aristocrats, merchants, and diplomats would use French to talk and to write to each other.
French continued to be the main language of international relations up until the end of the second world war.
After the 1940s, partly due to the growing influence of the United States, English has become the main lingua franca across the world.
With the colonial expansion of imperialistic powers and their languages Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch, since about the 15th century, the name lingua franca came to be used as a common noun.
Throughout European colonisation, people from different language groups were forced to work together as slaves or indentured workers. They would communicate with each other, and with their masters, using a simplified language, for limited purposes – simple commands, questions and statements using a mixture of what each of them knew.
Such makeshift communication is known as pidgin language (from the English word business).
Pidgins can be used as lingua francas. Once speakers of a pidgin start marrying each other, a pidgin may become the sole language spoken by the next generation of children. It then expands into a fully-fledged language – a Creole – used for all purposes.
Creoles such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Sranan in Suriname, Kristang in Malaysia, and Haitian Creole in Haiti are lingua francas used across these countries.
A global language can also be of artificial origin.
The end of the 19th century saw an explosion of interest in constructing global languages. The most prominent of these was Esperanto, “the language of hope”, created by Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887 as “the international language”, or a general lingua franca. Esperanto still boasts a couple thousand native speakers, and many more enthusiasts, but is gradually on the wane.
Lingua francas arise when required, and fade when replaced by others.
German faded as a lingua franca with the loss of German colonies after the first world war. Portuguese remains a lingua franca across Brazil, and Spanish across other South American countries.
And the global use of French is still there: we send a letter par avion, or to poste restante.
But there is one winner, well ahead of the rest. English has now grown to be the global language, spreading well beyond native speakers and the former colonies of English-speaking powers. English is the language of world-wide diplomacy, scholarship, and especially technological advances, social media and artificial intelligence.
Does the aggressive spread of English threaten to put an end to all other languages, minority languages and other lingua franca alike, and language diversity across the world? The jury is still out.
The growing importance of Mandarin Chinese as a main lingua franca across China, of Arabic across Africa and the Middle East, and people’s resilience to keep their languages going – and with them their cultures and histories – may well keep English at bay.
That segment was written by Alexandra Aikhenvald, a Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow at Jawun Research Institute, CQUniversity in Australia. It originally ran on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
We'll start this next segment with a listener question: Peter asked, "Why are so many people now saying 'that' instead of 'who' as a pronoun when referring to people or groups of people? I’m referring to recent movies and online videos. I grew up understanding that we should use 'who' when referring to people and 'that' when referring to non-people, such as animals or inanimate objects. Did I miss some crossroads that’s happened in U.S. English?"
Thanks, Peter. This is a question I've heard since my first days of doing Grammar Girl, so it's not new. It's more likely that you noticed it at some point, and then once you fired up that particular neuron, you kept noticing it. Linguists call this the "recency illusion," and it happens to the best of us.
So, you're also not alone in having been taught not to use "that" for people. Many people have been taught that you shouldn't use the pronoun “that” to refer to a person — that a sentence such as “Girls that have long hair buy more scrunchies,” is wrong, and that it should be “Girls who have long hair buy more scrunchies.” In fact, I was taught that rule, but it turns out it’s a myth.
It’s not wrong to use “who,” but it’s also not wrong to use “that.” I checked a bunch of major style guides. Garner’s Modern English Usage, the Chicago Manual of Style, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage all say that although it’s always fine to use “who,” it’s also fine to use “that.” For example, it’s fine to write something like “Girls that have long hair buy more scrunchies.”
Writers have been doing it for a very long time, and the objection to it is more recent. Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, used “that” to refer to people, and Merriam-Webster notes that usage writers only started objecting to it in the early 1900s.
I actually crafted that earlier scrunchie sentence to highlight the instance where Fowler said using “that” is most common: when you’re writing about someone who represents a class rather than an individual person. In that sentence — "Girls that have long hair buy more scrunchies" — we’re talking about girls with long hair in general, not one specific girl.
That’s a little bit different from a sentence like “The girls who stole my scrunchie should give it back,” in which I’m talking about very specific girls. Fowler would say that it’s OK to use “that” in a sentence like that too, just that it’s less common than doing so in a sentence where the person represents a whole class of people like girls that have long hair, or boys that wear bandanas, or babies that cry.
Fowler also covers instances in which you have a human and an inanimate object together. In those cases you should clearly use “that,” especially when the inanimate object comes second, as in “I enjoy spending time with writers and songs that make me happy.”
And now I need to mention rules versus styles. Note that although in general grammar it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that you must use “who” to refer to people, certain style guides do require it. For example, if you’re following AP style, you are required to use “who” and not “that” to refer to humans.
And now, let’s move on to animals.
The Associated Press also provides useful guidance about animals, presumably because their writers find themselves writing about pets often enough to need clarification. The editors recommend using the pronouns “it” and “that” for animals unless you know the animal’s sex or the animal has a name.
For example, if you were writing about a cat and you didn’t know much about it, you’d write something like “The cat that was stuck in the tree peed on the firefighters.”
But if the cat had a name, you’d write something like “Mr. Bigglesworth, the cat who was stuck in the tree, peed on the firefighters.”
And if you only knew that it was a female cat or you were just using pronouns, you’d write something like “The cat who was stuck in the tree meowed at her owner.”
Again, we have style issues to deal with. For example, APA style has different recommendations again. It recommends using “that” to refer to animals such as cats and rats, not “who.” This is just a guess, but I wonder whether the APA might stick with “that” for animals because, unlike Associated Press writers, APA writers are most often writing about lab animals instead of pets. That stylebook also recommends against anthropomorphizing animals, for example. But regardless, it’s important to remember that even though the general rules are flexible, the rules may be more rigid if you’re following a specific style guide, so be sure to check.
And since we're talking about the less common uses of the pronoun "who," I'll also tell you about the strange case where we use a form of “who” to talk about inanimate objects: “whose.” Since modern English doesn’t have a separate possessive pronoun for inanimate objects, we use “whose” for both people and things. We can talk about the man whose leg was broken and the table whose leg was broken. Both are fine. (Well, not fine for the man or the table, but grammatically fine!)
Occasionally, people think or have been taught that they can’t use “whose” for objects, but the style guides are clear that it’s fine. In fact, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage says, “The notion that ‘whose’ may not properly be used of anything except persons is a superstition.”
If it bothers you, though, you can always rewrite the sentence. “The table whose legs were broken” can become something like “the table with the broken leg” or “the table that had a broken leg.”
As always when we talk about myths, I want you to know the facts, but it’s also important to remember that there are people out there who believe the myths and will incorrectly think you've done something wrong. So if you want to play it safe, you can stick with the fake rules, but I want you to know what you’re doing and to be able to make an informed choice.
Thanks for the question, Peter!
Finally, I have familect story from Erika.
"Hi, Mignon, this is Erika in Edmonton. Like so many couples and families, my spouse, Stephen, and I practically speak in our own language when no one else is around, and I think my favorite example of this is the 'doot doot doot.' Stephen’s favorite kind of dog is the kind of scruffy little white terrier whose face, from a distance, is made up of three black dots: two eyes and a nose. So, when showing me a really cute picture, he’ll point at each of these saying, 'doot doot doot.' Thus, eventually, 'doot doot doot' became shorthand for an adorable little pup. So, if I’m scrolling the hashtag ‘dogs of Mastodon,’ I might stop and say, 'Ooh, look at this cute little doot doot doot!' So, while it’s certainly not our only familect, it’s definitely the most adorable."
I love it. And it immediately made me think of the pictures of dog faces that early AI systems couldn't distinguish from blueberry muffins. I don't think they were terriers. I think they were chihuahuas, but they all had the three black doot, doot, doot dots on their little white faces. I'll put a link in the show notes for people who've never seen it before. It's funny.
Thanks for the call Erika!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Dan Feierabend; Steven Schapansky, Holly Hutchings; Nat Hoopes; and Maram Elnagheeb, who has lived on three different continents.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.