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Lingua franca communication in multiethnic contexts 201

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commerce in the Mediterranean from the 15 century until the 19 (Wans-
brough 1996). Since Lingua Franca was a trade language, the term lingua
franca, when eventually extended to other languages used for communication
across linguistic boundaries, was understood as synonymous to auxiliary lan-
guage (Samarin 1987), and the use of a language as a lingua franca was strongly
associated with its performing specific purposes.
Samarin (1987) distinguishes three types of lingua francas: natural, pidgin-
ized, and planned languages can and do serve as lingua francas. An example of a
planned lingua franca is Esperanto, which was designed to enable world-wide
communication, but which today mainly serves to unite the community of Es-
perantists (Fiedler 2002). In this context, Esperanto is used as a spoken lan-
guage in interpersonal communication and for radio broadcasts. Yet there is also
a considerable body of literature, translated and original, as well as the commu-
nity’s own newspaper.
Whereas a planned language such as Esperanto has been engineered and then
been spread across a wider community, pidginized languages emerged out of
communicative necessity. As Mesthrie et al. (2000: 280) point out, they “arise
when groups of people who do not speak a common language come into contact
with each other. […] The need for the rapid development of a means of com-
munication results in a relatively simple type of language which may draw on the
languages of the groups involved.” Pidgins emerged as lingua francas mainly in
the Pacific, in Asia, in the Caribbean, and on the West African coasts. Diverse
social conditions favored the development of pidgins, such as slavery (the cause
for most Caribbean pidgins and creoles), trade, European settlements, war, and
labor migration (for example giving rise to Gastarbeiterdeutsch). Many of these
pidgins existed for a short time only and never stabilized. By definition, pidgins
have no native speakers. However, this does not generally imply that they are
used for restricted purposes only, as section 2.2 will explain.
Pidgins emerged whenever individuals did not share a language for com-
munication. But frequently speakers can resort to a third, already existing, lan-
guage which, however, is not the mother tongue of all of them. For example, a
Turkish and a Chinese businesswoman may conduct their negotiations in Eng-
lish, if neither of them has sufficient command of the other’s mother tongue.
This type of lingua franca communication in a natural language has been at the
centre of research during the last two decades or so. Largely, however, research
has concentrated on the use of English as a lingua franca (see Knapp and Meier-
kord 2002, Lesnyák 2004, Pölzl 2003, Seidlhofer 2000, Smit 2003).
Lingua franca communication, then, involves the use of a language which
most often is the mother tongue of neither of the speakers participating in the in-
teraction. But no matter whether its speakers are native or non-native speakers,
lingua francas have come – due to increased migration and interlingual relation-
ships – to be employed for a variety of functions, which extend well beyond