Lingua franca in its polymorphous manifestations

S. Baggio e P. Taravacci edited a new and very welcome contribution to the study of lingua franca, which follows another book edited by the same team from the Trento University scholar in 2020 about natural and invented languages (reviewed in 2021 in the 31.2 issue of the Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, pp. 325–332). After the presentation (pp. 3–4) the volume offers as the first chapter a translation into Italian of Die Lingua franca, by Hugo Schuchardt (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 33 (1909), pp. 441–461). The translation is by Federica Venier (pp. 5–32) and reproduces, with corrections, the one published in 2009 in issue 29 of the journal Linguistica e filologia (pp. 7–31). In that same issue F. Venier also published a comment (pp. 33–60) with extensive bibliographical references. The rest of the volume collects twelve essays and closes with bio-bibliographical information about the authors (pp. 327–334) and an index of names (pp. 335–346). The first five chapters (by Cifoletti, Baglioni, Sanga, Banfi, Sottile-Scaglione) cover the notion, features and history of the lingua franca proper. The other chapters are about comparable notions (Crevatin, about Dachsprache), languages that in various ways happen to be defined as lingua francas (De Villa for Yiddish, Manzelli, for Nahuatl, Tosco for Arabic, Micheli for Dyula), writing systems (Astori) and historical and theoretical aspects (Poli). Most of the papers are written in Italian, but there are two chapters written in English