rth Atlantic States, whose population is more than
half (50.9 per cent.) made up of aliens and natives born of foreign
parents,[498] have drawn these elements from almost the whole circle of
Atlantic shores, from Norway to Argentine and from Argentine to
Newfoundland. Even the Southern States, so long unattractive to
immigrants on account of the low status of labor, show a fringe of
various foreign elements along the Gulf coast, the deeper tint of which
on the census maps fades off rapidly toward the interior. The same
phenomenon appears with Asiatic and Australian elements in our Pacific
seaboard states.[499] The cosmopolitan population of New York, with its
"Chinatown," its "Little Italy," its Russian and Hungarian quarters, has
its counterpart in the mixed population of Mascat, peopled by Hindu,
Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, and Baluchis, settled here for purposes
of trade; or in the equally mongrel inhabitants of Aden and Zanzibar, of
Marseilles, Constantinople, Alexandria, Port Said, and other
Mediterranean ports.

[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 "N