[Koshkin]

That's not exactly true. To quote Wikipedia, Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.

[qwytw]

> to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.

Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects, coincidentally places where most of those merchants who introduced that language came from).

[thaumasiotes]

> Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects

So, very closely related to French?

[hardlianotion]

To be fair to parent, France is on the western side of the Mediterranean sea.

[qwytw]

It wasn't even on the Mediterranean at the time (or rather French was spoken in the North of modern France back then). People on Mediterranean coast of France were speaking Occitan and other dialects which were more closely related to Catalan and Northern Italian (all of those were mostly eradicated during and during the century or so after the French revolution).

[rockinghigh]

The eradication of Occitan and other local languages like Breton was the strongest in mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Students speaking it would be punished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha