The making of the Dictionnaire de la langue franque

Abstract

Abstract Our knowledge of the structural features of Lingua Franca (LF), a Romance-based contact language of the Mediterranean, is heavily dependent on a single publication, the Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque published anonymously in Marseille in 1830. Various aspects of the Dictionnaire have been explored in previous studies, including the lexical makeup and the structural features of the LF variety it records and the orthography that it employs for LF. This study advances our understanding of the Dictionnaire and of its place in the LF scholarship by focusing on a previously unexplored aspect of this important but understudied publication: its sources.