Do Vehicular Languages Just Happen?
November 11, 2024
Despite (or maybe due to) inflation and other global economic challenges, a majority of businesses today are expanding their geographic reach to deliver products and services across the global village. After all, moving into new markets increases a company’s revenue potential by having access to a larger customer base with diversified revenue streams. However, selling products and services in a new marketplace can be challenging as it requires navigating unfamiliar cultural influences, including numerous languages and dialects.
Although there’s no definitive starting point, humans have lived in a multilingual world for as long as different languages have been spoken, and this predates written records. But records from ancient civilizations indicate that communicating across multiple languages likely began with the earliest movement of people across different tribal regions. Ancients like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians created a pidgin language called Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir) as the primary language for traders and Crusaders.
The use of combined languages has existed since antiquity but was coined as a functional term by the Italians as a language of commerce. Thus a lingua franca is defined as any language used between people who do not share a native language. Without doubt these so-called trade languages have developed globally throughout human history and quickly extended communication beyond facilitating trade to include cultural, religious, diplomatic, and administrative needs for exchanging information.
Growth of multiple language lingua francas...
Whereas a native language is a person’s mother tongue and acquired during childhood through interaction with adults, lingua francas differ in that they are used as a vehicular language with more widespread impact. Natives of a community would continue to speak their mother tongue but would use a simplified method of communication with a smaller vocabulary built from shared words, sounds, and body language. These pidgin languages are grammatical simplifications that do not have complicated phrase structures and exclude linguistic characteristics such as number or gender. More recently, Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by a Polish doctor to serve as a lingua franca that was not intended to replace anyone’s native language for communication; but to be a simplified language between people who don’t share a common language.
Pidgin Languages versus Lingua Francas
Pidgin languages are a simplified language that combine words when groups of people needed to communicate. Although pidgin languages were often a type of lingua franca, the meaning of the term “lingua franca” has changed over time. Originally, it was the combined words and signs used to aid communication, but today a given language can be a useful lingua franca. For example, French was the “language of diplomacy” for over three hundred years and is still the lingua franca of global institutions like the International Olympic Committee.
Lingua francas can include working languages, trade languages, contact languages, scholarly languages and languages of diplomacy. The pidgin versions of trade languages are bare-bones and borrow a few key words from source languages but feature simplified grammar. English is the current lingua franca of international business, education, science, technology, diplomacy, entertainment, radio, seafaring, and aviation. Moreover, English is now considered to be the world’s most useful second language and is spoken in many nations.
Pidgin languages have few speakers and no native speakers. In fact, when a pidgin language becomes the language of a second generation, it is called a creole language. Naturally, creole languages are more developed with a more complex grammar, vocabulary and structure than its pidgin ancestors. Vernacular languages are a slang-like way people speak within specific cultures. It varies by region and can include slang, obscenities and casual speech. The different ways people in US, UK and Australia speak English is vernacular.
Today's Global Village of Cultural Interactions
In addition to many native languages, lingua francas, pidgins and creoles are time-stamped representations of groups of people figuring out how to communicate in non-native languages. Pidgins have distinct characteristics that make them different from the first and second languages used by speakers as they develop. For example, the key words taken from other languages lack inflections on verbs and nouns, plus there’s no need for conjunctions and articles. In ways, pidgins are a simpler means of communication that are void of complex sentences.
Some pidgins have survived for several generations and are spoken as vernaculars by some users, including Nigerian Pidgin which has no status as an official language with Nigerian English being used in politics, education, science, and media. However, once a pidgin language becomes syntactically rich and used as the native language of the children of adult pidgin speakers, it is then called a creole language. Similar to Hawaiian Pidgin, Nigerian Pidgin is based on a creole mix of English and local languages and is predominantly used in informal conversations.
Generally speaking, pidgins are distinct from a lingua franca in that members of a group rarely use it to talk to one another. Lingua francas over time have become a third language (i.e., English); or based on an early dialect of a major language (i.e., Hindustani); or a true silk trader’s language from the first millennium BCE (i.e., Sogdian). Creole languages evolve as a primary language as a pidgin is passed from its founding generation, such as Swahili which grew out of Arabic and Bantu in eastern Africa and spoken today as a mother tongue or fluent second language.
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The use of lingua francas for selling products and services to people of a different native tongue hasn’t worked as well in today’s global village as it may have for early traders traveling The Silk Road in 130 B.C.. In today’s digital world, organizations who want to remain at the forefront of global trade must embrace multilingual messaging to make their potential customers feel included, so they too can identify as being an important part of your business’s brand. To learn more about our translation and multi-lingual interpretation services, contact a language specialist today at 800-287-9755.
