[Sidenote:  Lingua franca of coasts.]

The cosmopolitanism and the commercial activity that characterize so many seaboards are reflected in the fact that, with rare exceptions, it is the coast regions of the world that give rise to a lingua franca or lingua geral.  The original lingua franca arose on the coast of the Levant during the period of Italian commercial supremacy there.  It consisted of an Italian stock, on which were grafted Greek, Arabic, and Turkish words, and was the regular language of trade for French, Spanish, and Italians.[500] It is still spoken in many Mediterranean ports, especially in Smyrna, and in the early part of the nineteenth century was in use from Madagascar to the Philippines.[501] From the coastal strip of the Zanzibar Arabs, recently transferred to German East Africa, the speech of the Swahili has become a means of communication over a great part of East Africa, from the coast to the Congo and the sources of the Nile.  It is a Bantu dialect permeated with Arabic and Hindu terms, and sparsely sprinkled even with English and German words.[502] “Pidgin English” (business English) performs the function of a lingua franca in the ports of China and the Far East.  It is a jargon of corrupted English with a slight mixture of Chinese, Malay, and Portuguese words, arranged according to the Chinese idiom.  Another mongrel English does service on the coast of New Guinea.  The “Nigger English” of the West African trade is a regular dialect among the natives of the Sierra Leone coast.  Farther east, along the Upper Guinea littoral, the Eboe family of tribes who extend across the Niger delta from Lagos to Old Calabar have furnished a language of trade in one of their dialects.[503] The Tupi speech of the Brazilian coast Indians, with whom the explorers first came into contact, became, in the mouth of Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, the lingua geral or medium of communication between the whites and the various Indian tribes throughout Brazil.[504] The Chinook Indians, located on our Pacific coast north and south of the Columbia River, have furnished a jargon of Indian, French, and English words which serves as a language of trade throughout a long stretch of the northwest Pacific coast, not only between whites and Indians, but also between Indians of different linguistic stocks.[505]

[Sidenote:  Coast-dwellers as middlemen.]

The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman.  One strip of seaboard produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is content with the transit trade of its own locality.  It breeds essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush competition.  The profits of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring class is small or slave.  Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the seaward expansion