Sull'affidabilità delle fonti della lingua franca mediterranea

The evaluation of sources and their reliability is a crucial issue for the study of the so-called Lingua Franca, i.e. the Romance-based elementary jargon used by Moors and Turks in the early modern Mediterranean when communicating with Western Europeans (especially slaves). A comparison between the many sources available reveals a central core of texts sharing well-defined characteristics (first-hand records referring to master-slave interactions in 17/18th-century Algiers), surrounded by other, to varying degrees eccentric, attestations. The congruity parameter is extremely useful for the analysis of the two major sources of Lingua Franca, the Topographía e historia general de Argel attributed to Diego de Haedo (1612), which is consistent with the information given by most other records, and the anonymous Dictionnaire de la langue franque (1830), that, despite its completeness, appears contradictory under many aspects and therefore less trustworthy.