It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba.
But here is its miracle — in that flattened, fractured, simplified speech, someone says I am afraid , and you understand not because the grammar is right but because the need is universal. lingua franca
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 beautiful, not in the way
Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca Here’s a short piece titled — written as
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.
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.