What Remains of An Atypical "Restsprache": The Mediterranean Lingua Franca

The so-called Mediterranean Lingua Franca, an Italian-based rudimentary variety serving for oral communications between Muslim masters and European slaves in Early Modern North Africa, has been seldom considered as a fragmentary language, mostly because of the availability of an anonymous dictionary (preceded by a grammatical outline and followed by an appendix of dialogues), seen by many scholars as the main source of this variety, despite its late chronology and internal contradictions. However, the attestations of Lingua Franca scattered in contemporary slavery accounts and travelogues often prove to be more reliable than the apparently orderly information provided by the dictionary, as well as more consistent with the socio-linguistic framework in which Lingua Franca originated and developed. The analysis of how Noun Inflection and the Verbal System are presented in the dictionary, compared with records found in other sources, confirms the need for a deconstruction of the ‛languageness’ of the Lingua Franca and its interpretation as a very peculiar case of Restsprache.