‘Una mezcla de todas las lenguas’: Mediterranean Lingua Franca in Spanish Literature

The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin of diverse Romance varieties with some elements from Greek, Arabic and Turkish, was used in the Barbary coast and the Levant from the late Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century as a means of communication between merchants, diplomats, soldiers and slaves. An exclusively oral variety employed by Muslims in their contacts with Christians, Lingua Franca is ironically preserved only in European sources such as diplomatic texts, travelogues and literature. The present study goes beyond the (socio)linguistic description of Lingua Franca and aims to analyse the representation of this language in canonical texts of Spanish literature, such as Juan de la Encina's poetry or Miguel de Cervantes’ Quixote. It argues that, in these texts, the inherent hybridity of Lingua Franca inadvertently undermines claims of monolingual and religious unity. By paying special attention to the aesthetic, ideological and religious dimensions of the implicit or explicit representations of Lingua Franca, this paper brings into current debates on multilingual literature what Cervantes called ‘una mezcla de todas las lenguas con la cual todos nos entendemos’ (‘a mixture of all languages, by means of which we can all understand each other’).