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16 - Colonization and the Emergence and Spread of Indigenous Lingua Francas in Africa, the Americas, and Asia

from Part Three - Lingua Francas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Hildo Honório do Couto
Edited by
Salikoko Mufwene  and
Anna Maria Escobar
Salikoko Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna Maria Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

This chapter presents an overview of the main lingua francas of the world. The theoretical framework is Ecosystemic Linguistics, a branch of Ecolinguistics which sees language as communication or communicative interaction, not primarily as a system. The system does exist, but in order to facilitate understanding. It is shown that lingua francas such as Swahili, Fanakalo, Lingala, Kituba, and Sango (in Africa), Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, Nahuatl, Lingua Geral/Nheengatu, and Quechua (in the Americas), and Malay and Filipino (in Asia), among others, confirm this view of language. They are mainly used in situations of contact between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, in which case the main concern is with mutual understanding, not with the construction of grammatical sentences. It is also shown that one of the main causes of the emergence of lingua francas is colonization.

Keywords

Lingua francacolonizationlanguage contactlanguage-as-communicationunderstanding.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure
 , pp. 429 - 452
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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