When talking about the languages of the Mediterranean, we should first give a brief explanation of the choice that Linguamón – House of Languages has made for this database. 

The languages which you will find in this section are divided into two major groups: 

• The territorial languages that skirt around the Mediterranean Sea.  
• Languages which due to a variety of historical reasons are currently spoken in the Mediterranean.     

Based on these criteria, languages such as Galician and Breton do not feature as Mediterranean languages because their respective linguistic domains do not touch its coast, even though they are spoken in two Mediterranean states, namely Spain and France. 

By contrast other languages such as English are in our database, as for a variety of historical reasons it is official in Malta and Gibraltar.  

From a territorial standpoint, the Mediterranean is a meeting point for languages from three language families: 

• Indo-European, represented by the Romance, southern Slavic, Greek and Albanian languages.
• Afro-Asiatic, represented by the Semitic languages (mainly Hebrew and Arabic) and Tamazight and Berber (with their assorted varieties).
• Altaic, with Turkish as its most significant representative.     

The linguistic history of the Mediterranean is full of contrasts as, on the one hand, it has experienced two of history’s most powerful linguistic expansions – those of Latin and Arabic – while on the other it is also a paradigm of the coexistence of extremely diverse language communities.
 

As is the case with many seas in the world, the shipping routes of the Mediterranean have enabled contacts to be forged between very different peoples. Linguistic evidence of these exchanges can now be found all around the world. 

To give some examples: Greek contains a large number of words such as catalogue, diamond, paper and tragedy, which are used by languages which have nothing to do with the Mediterranean. Through Greek, Egyptian culture has also given the world words like papyrus and pyramid. Many animal names which are in the dictionaries of most languages on the planet also have Greek origins: camel, crocodile, dromedary, hippopotamus, leopard, ostrich, rhinoceros, etc. Moreover, in addition to having provided terms used in everyday life (such as sandal), Greek continues today to be a source for the creation of new words or neologisms, and for words which are built up from Greek and Latin roots (telephone, hypochondria, metaphysics, heterogeneous, etc.).

Greek shares its role as a supplier of neologisms and as a source for building words with another Mediterranean language, Latin, which over the centuries diversified into the Romance languages which in turn have spread as official state languages to every continent. These languages, subsequently to be joined by English, have provided the world with words such as auditorium, fantasy, forum, index, page and sponsor, among many others. 

Arabic has also provided many words to the world’s languages through exchanges carried out in the Mediterranean. Words such as zero, arithmetic and algebra, and other more quotidian ones such as cotton, aubergine and magazine, can be identified in many languages spoken today. 

In addition to words, more evidence of the linguistic exchanges between the peoples of the Mediterranean was the lingua franca, a language used in the sea’s ports from the time of the Crusades up until the start of the 20th century by European, Turkish and Arab sailors and traders. The basis of the Mediterranean lingua franca  is essentially Romance, but there are also Greek, Turkish and Arab elements. 

Nowadays the expression lingua franca is used to denote any language used as a means of communication between two or more groups – or people – who do not share a common language. In this sense Aramaic is a clear example of a lingua franca used in ancient times in the Middle East and all along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean, until it was replaced in this role by Arabic from the 7th century onwards. 

Aside from English, now used as a lingua franca worldwide, some classical examples of non-European lingua franca are Nahuatl, Swahili and Kâte, whose expansion has led to numerous cases of other indigenous languages being replaced.