lingua franca
\liŋ.ɡwa fʁɑ̃.ka\
The verdict
“lingua franca” is uncommon French (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Mélange de langues latines utilisé comme langue d’échange dans les différents ports méditerranéens entre le XIIIᵉ et le XIXᵉ siècle.
Corpus desk
Index FR-lingua-franca · lingua franca · French
lingua franca · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "L" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lingua franca |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \liŋ.ɡwa fʁɑ̃.ka\ |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « lingua franca » en français
Rare enough to double-check
lingua franca is uncommon French outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed \liŋ.ɡwa fʁɑ̃.ka\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for lingua franca in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct French form is lingua franca, spelled L-I-N-G-U-A- -F-R-A-N-C-A.
Definition
- 1Mélange de langues latines utilisé comme langue d’échange dans les différents ports méditerranéens entre le XIIIᵉ et le XIXᵉ siècle.
- 2Toute langue véhiculaire utilisée par un groupe composé de personnes de langues maternelles diverses.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how lingua franca appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
[…] je leur ai parlé dans autant de langues […] : latin, français, espagnol, italien et Lingua Franca mais tout cela sans résultat.
Les Abbassides encouragèrent plus encore une civilisation cosmopolite, dont Bagdad fut le centre et l’arabe la lingua franca.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.