Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur

"Following her acclaimed study of Lingua Franca, Nolan presents another compelling historical detective story, carefully assembling evidence to trace the intellectual, personal and political links between the ephemeral and transitory, yet wide-spread colloquial trade languages of the Mediterranean and the military jargons of colonial French West Africa, uncovering hitherto unknown and unexplored connections and similarities."

-Lutz Marten, Professor of General and African Linguistics, SOAS, UK

"This book explores an under-researched aspect of colonial language policy: the spread of pidgin in the French empire in the nineteenth century and the role of General Louis Faidherbe, first governor of colonial Senegal, in its development. Using hitherto unused archives, Joanna Nolan's groundbreaking work provides new insights both into how pidgins develop and early French colonial policy in Africa."

-Tony Chafer, Professor of African and French Studies, University of Portsmouth, UK

This book explores how the eponymous and original Lingua Franca was recognized as a potential linguistic template for future military and colonial pidgins. The author traces the career trajectory of General Louis Faidherbe, a member of the French colonizing force in Algiers in the early 1830s and a recognized linguist, who rose up through the ranks in various African colonies and was the founder of the West African regiment, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. The tirailleurs' partially artificially constructed military pidgin, Français Tirailleur, was a language potentially modelled on the reduced grammar and lexicon of Lingua Franca. This book suggests, through Faidherbe, a direct link between the two languages, as well as connections with other colonial pidgins in Asia that may also derived to some extent from Lingua Franca. It will be of interest to students and scholars of language contact and language history, pidgins and creoles, and military and colonial history.

Joanna Nolan is a research associate at SOAS in London, UK, from where she holds a PhD in Linguistics. She also holds masters' degrees from both Oxford and Columbia Universities. She has contributed to BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme on the subject of Lingua Franca.