Akkadian and then Aramaic remained the common languages of a large part of Western Asia from several earlier empires. Examples of lingua francas remain numerous and exist on every continent. The most obvious example as of the early 21st century is English , which could be defined as the main lingua franca but there are many other lingua francas , such as French , Spanish , Urdu , Hindi , Portuguese , Russian , German , Arabic , Bengali , Mandarin , Turkish and Swahili.