A mixture of the different Mediterranean Romance languages, devised and used mainly by Genoese and Venetian sailors and merchants in ports and coastal areas until the nineteenth century. The vocabulary was mostly Italian with Castilian, Sephardic, Catalan, Portuguese, Occitan, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic terms. Even Cervantes speaks of this language that was used when he was a prisoner in Algiers. Molière, in the Bourgeois Gentleman, gives us some detail in Scene X: If you know how to answer; I don't know how to tazir, tazir . (If you know, speak; if you don't be silent)
