While volunteering at Bluesfest last week, I struck up a conversation with a fellow volunteer who was sitting beside me in Volunteer Check-in. I learned that she was originally from Spain, and our discussion quickly turned to one focused on languages. She indicated that she knew Spanish, Catalan, English, some Italian and a little French. I said that I knew English, French, some Brazilian Portuguese and a little Italian.

To pass the time between checking in volunteers, I proposed a game: I would say a sentence in Brazilian Portuguese and she would translate it to English, then she would say something in Spanish and I would translate it to English. It proved to be a fun game, as we were both quite successful at interpreting a language we didn't know but that was similar to one we did.

Our conversation reminded me of an exchange I had had with a colleague from Chile in 2010. We were both part of an international working group made up of representatives from 12 countries. My Chilean colleague spoke Spanish but not English, and I spoke English but not Spanish. However, we both spoke French. Coincidentally, we both had French-speaking spouses: his wife was from France; my husband, from Quebec. So French was our lingua franca.

What is a lingua franca? In her Duolingo article What is a lingua franca, and how does it improve communication?, linguist and educator Emilie Zuniga defines a lingua franca as a language that neither party to a conversation speaks natively? For my Chilean colleague and me, that language was French, the second language for each of us.

Zuniga explains the origin of the term:

Today, lingua franca is a term that can indicate many different languages—but it started as the name of an actual language spoken in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to 18th centuries. Lingua comes from the Italian (and Latin) word for "tongue" or "language," and franca referred to Western Europeans. To the people who first used the phrase Lingua Franca, the language sounded like what people spoke in Western Europe. And that's not far from the truth: Lingua Franca (also called Sabir) was a pidgin language—a simplified language based on other languages—and in this case, it was a mix of different Romance languages and other languages used around the Mediterranean.

Lingua franca enabled trade and diplomacy among people whose native language differed, says Zuniga.

She concludes her article with this statement: "No matter what language you're studying, it's connecting you with people from all over the globe!"

That has been my experience. Last week, for example, a sales associate who was helping me turned out to be from Brazil. Once I learned this, I took the opportunity to speak in Portuguese to him. Every time I speak Portuguese, I feel a bit more comfortable using the language.

Perhaps my comfort also comes from reaching 700 days of learning Brazilian Portuguese on Duolingo. The streak continues.

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post and listening to random songs on Spotify, George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You" came up. These lyrics were particularly appropriate:

It's gonna take time

Whole lot of precious time

It's gonna take patience and time

To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it

To do it right

It takes time to learn a language. Fortunately, I have a lifetime to do so.