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The Would-Be Gentleman ), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in lingua franca (for obvious comical effect):
    Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir;
    se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir.
    Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti?
    Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir.
    If you know, / you must respond.
    If you don’t know, / you must shut up.
    I am the Mufti, / who are you?
    I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up. 2
    It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned lingua franca into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as Franj, caring little whether they said oc, oïl, ja or yes. Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as algèbre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.
     
    The greatest export of langues d’oïl was to England, and it happened almost accidentally. The English king Edward the Confessor had promised his crown to two men: William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold Godwinson, a duke who had become his right-hand man. When Edward died in 1066, William sailed to Hastings and quickly put an end to any confusion by defeating Harold in battle and seizing the English crown. He made his langue d’oïl dialect, Norman, the language of the English Crown and inaugurated a succession of French-speaking kings that lasted three and a half centuries. The first English king to speak English as a mother tongue was Henry IV (ruled 1399–1413), and his successor, Henry V, was the first to write official documents in English.
    French might have foundered in England if William had not been such a competent ruler. He settled his people everywhere, established a new feudal system and instituted an efficient administration that made England the first centralized regime of Europe. The English nobility, civil servants, employees of the palace and Court, and merchant class quickly fell into line and started speaking the language of the king, even those who were born in England. St. Thomas Becket was known in his time as Thomas à Becket, and the ancestors of the poet Chaucer were chaussiers (shoemakers). The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was:
    Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
    set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne,
    Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne…
    King Charles, our great emperor,
    stayed in Spain a full seven years:
    and he conquered the high lands up to the sea…
    Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480.
    But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way