Word: franca
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Indeed, it is Western, not traditional music, that has become the Japanese lingua franca. On television, the strains of Voi che sapete from The Marriage of Figaro plug Suntory whisky, and a Strauss waltz is used as a background for a refrigerator-deodorizer ad. At a children's concert by the New Japan Philharmonic recently, more than 2,000 grade schoolers in the audience rose at the conductor's behest and, in two-part harmony, sang the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth...
...Italy. When the pair landed in Rome, they were met by the CIA's "M" and a cadre of American and Italian intelligence agents. Lombino was hustled away to a hotel a block from the U.S. embassy. Twice during the next day, he met with Franca Musi, a Red Brigades courier who had been captured two weeks earlier in Rome. The Italians thought that Musi, whose family had underworld connections, might give valuable information to Lombino, but she claimed only to know that Dozier was being held some where in Padua...
...real spice of the islands is talk-and very good talk it can be. The lingua franca of the Lesser Antilles is English, though it is not always understood on St. Barts, where the blacks also speak Creole and villagers of Breton and Norman descent converse in varied patois. While Dutch is their official language, few Statians or Sabans ever use it. Many, however, do speak Papiamento, the merry island melange of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and African dialects ("Bon tim ni un quenta ta coppé tras mi mucha muhé; bai hombre sushi, i lagele...
...other major non-Caucasian strain is Filipino (17%), followed by Chinese and Korean. Thus while Hawaiian, a melodious language that the missionaries alphabetized into a mere twelve characters, is still spoken and sung on the island, many natives converse in pidgin English, the world's most colorful lingua franca. A dark-hued hotel waiter, cussed out by an irate Texan who has received the soup in his lap, retorts: "Eh, now, no take out on me, you stupid buggah! Udderwise bimeby I gone broke your head in small tiny pieces...
...Mande-Tan, representing a subgroup, proposed as official language of Mali, important lingua franca of western Africa, having some literature written in Arabic script or indigenous script (e.g. Vai) and spoken by over six million people...