List of lingua francas

However, Tuareg, a branch of the Berber languages, is still playing the role of a lingua franca to some extent in some vast parts of the Sahara Desert, especially in southern Algeria and Libya, and northern Mali and western Niger.

[1] Fon is regarded as the lingua franca of the southern third of Benin, which is the most densely populated area and includes the largest cities and the national capital.

[citation needed] Kanuri has historically been an important lingua franca around the Lake Chad region due to its association with the powerful Kanem-Borno empire.

It is based on the Northern Ngbandi language spoken by the Sango people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo but with a large vocabulary of French loan words.

[6] At least as early as the late 18th century, Swahili was used along trading and slave routes that extended west across Lake Tanganyika and into the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo.

[citation needed] Temne is a regional lingua franca of northwestern Sierra Leone, although almost the entire population speaks the Krio language.

Closely related languages are used as lingua francas in Sierra Leone (Krio), Liberia (Liberian Kreyol) and Bioko island of Equatorial Guinea (Pichinglis).

[7] Arabic script is/has been used in languages including Afrikaans, Azeri, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bengali, Hausa, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Malay, Morisco, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Somali, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, and Uzbek.

Groups of Syriac rite Christians, particularly the Assyrian people, continued the use of Aramaic in religious services, while developing a spoken vernacular which ultimately evolved into the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Middle East.

In the Terai i.e. floodplain districts of Nepal (along the Indian border), Hindi is a dominant language, though the people's mother tongues are typically Awadhi, Maithili, or Bhojpuri.

[citation needed] Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese served as both the written lingua franca and the diplomatic language in Far East Asia including China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and Vietnam.

[citation needed] Nefamese is a pidgin that was once the main lingua franca of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, although it has been increasingly replaced by Hindi.

[25] Arnold Joseph Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail: In the Iranic world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art ... gained a currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia.

[citation needed] Sadri, also known as Nagpuri, is a Bihari-group language that functions as the lingua franca of the linguistically diverse Chota Nagpur plateau in India, mainly in the state of Jharkhand.

[32] The Sogdians also ended up circulating spiritual beliefs and texts, including those of Buddhism and Christianity, thanks to their ability to communicate to many people in the region through their native language.

[citation needed] John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India[36] and Sri Lanka.

Another example is the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, who published his book "Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum" in 1741 about an ideal society "Potu" ("Utop" backwards) with equality between the genders and an egalitarian structure, in Latin in Germany to avoid Danish censorship and to reach a greater audience.

[citation needed] Later texts written in each of those territories then began to take on characteristics of the local Slavic vernaculars and, by the mid-11th century, Old Church Slavonic had diversified into a number of regional varieties (known as recensions).

The Church Slavonic language is the later form which continued to be used as a written lingua franca for religious matters in large areas of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, known as Orthodox Slavdom.

[citation needed] English is the current lingua franca of international business, education, science, technology, diplomacy, entertainment, radio, seafaring, and aviation.

Today, although to a much diminished degree after World War II, it is still a common second language in a few countries which were formerly part of the empire, such as Slovenia (50% of the population, next to English with 57%), Croatia (34%),[47] the Czech Republic (28%) and Slovakia (28%).

In recent years, the language has seen a resurgence in public interest, and it is increasingly being used as a mode of communication between speakers of (northern) German and (eastern) Dutch nationality.

When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of the lingua franca with the local languages.

[citation needed] Portuguese remains an important lingua franca in the Portuguese-speaking African countries, East Timor, and to a certain extent, in Macau where it is recognized as an official language alongside Chinese, though in practice not commonly and widely spoken.

[citation needed] Chinook Jargon was originally constructed from a great variety of Amerind words of the Pacific Northwest, arising as an intra-indigenous contact language in a region marked by divisive geography and intense linguistic diversity.

As a result, the Jargon also had the beginnings of its own literature, mostly translated scripture and classical works, and some local and episcopal news, community gossip and events, and diaries.

Writing in 1972, he remarked that at that later date "Only a few can speak it fully, men of ninety or a hundred years old, like Henry Broderick, the realtor, and Joshua Green, the banker.

[citation needed] Prior to European colonization, the Occaneechi dialect of the Tutelo language served as a lingua franca in the land that would become the state of Virginia.

It was not until the rebellion of Túpac Amaru II that the Spanish authorities changed to a policy of Hispanization that was continued by the republican states of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

It is spoken by some 10 million people throughout much of South America (mostly in Peru, southwestern and central Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, northwestern Argentina and northern Chile).