It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river.
It is not the language we first cried in, nor the one our mothers used to shush the night. It is not sacred, not ancestral, not carved into runestones or sung in epics.
And maybe that is enough. Because before poetry, before prayer, before the love letter and the curse, there was this: two people, no shared cradle, and the desperate, generous act of making meaning anyway.
Lingua franca is the tongue of the in-between — the airport lounge, the trade route, the broken elevator, the help desk at three a.m., the peace treaty signed in a borrowed alphabet.
Lingua franca is the language of strangers becoming temporary friends, of orders given and understood without loyalty, of survival dressed in a few hundred words.
It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba.
Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over a gorge, a splint on a broken leg, a key that turns in a hundred different locks, none of them its own.
Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca