Lingua franca and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Romance-based pidgin language used by European merchants and sailors during the 2nd millennium. A world language – a language spoken internationally and learned and spoken by a large number of people – is a language that may function as a global lingua franca. Lingua Franca refers to any language used for communication between people who do not share a native language. It can refer to hybrid languages such as pidgins and creoles used for communication between language groups. It can also refer to
Italian language to different linguistic branches. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered "historical language minorities", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved. The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely