Mediterranean Lingua Franca

The Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir was a pidgin language used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th century.

Lingua franca means "language of the Franks" in Late Latin, and originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce. However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period. Later, lingua franca came to mean any contact language. Its other name in the Mediterranean area was Sabir, deriving from a Romance base meaning "to know".

Based mostly on Northern Italian languages and Occitano-Romance languages in the eastern Mediterranean area at first, it later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary coast (today referred to as the Maghreb). Sabir also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic. This mixed language was used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio, Barbary pirates and European in pre-colonial Algiers. Historically the first to use it were the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean after the year 1000.