- A Glossary of Lingua Franca -- Introduction A Dead Language What is Lingua Franca Lingua Franca is a pidgin, a trade language used by numerous language communities around the Mediterranean, to communicate with others whose language they did not speak. It is, in fact, the mother of all pidgins, seemingly in use since the Middle Ages and surviving until the nineteenth century, when it disappeared ...uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition2/lingua.2.html