of the language. The term Frangistan ("Land of the Franks") was used by Muslims to refer to Christian Europe and was commonly used over several centuries in Iran and the Ottoman Empire. The Chinese called the Portuguese 佛郎機 ("Franks") in the 1520s at the Battle of Tunmen and Battle of Xicaowan. Some other varieties of Mandarin Chinese pronounced the characters as Fah-lan-ki. The Mediterranean Lingua Franca (or "Frankish language") was a pidgin first spoken by 11th century European Christians and Muslims in Mediterranean ports that remained in use until the 19th century. Examples of derived words include: () in Greek in Albanian in Turkish in Azerbaijani (derived from Persian) , and in Arabic , in Persian, also the toponym Faranji in Tajik. Ferengi or Faranji in some Turkic languages in Amharic, in Tigrinya, and derivative forms in other languages of the Horn of Africa, refers to white people or any white (European stock) person or in Hindi and Urdu (derived from Persian) Phirangee in some other Indian languages in Tamil in Malayalam; in Sinhala, the word refers specifically to Portuguese people () in Burmese in Khmer in Malay or Fah-lan-ki () and Fulang in Chinese () in Thai. ("blonde"), ("temperament/al") in Bahasa Indonesia In the Thai usage, the word can refer to any European person. When the presence of US soldiers during the Vietnam War placed Thai people in contact with African Americans, they (and people of African ancestry in general) came to be called ("Black Farang", ). Such words sometimes also connote things, plants or creatures introduced by Europeans/Franks. For example, in Khmer, , literally "French Chicken", refers to a turkey and in Thai, is the name both for Europeans and for the guava fruit, introduced by Portuguese traders over 400 years ago. In contemporary Israel, the Yiddish word () has, by a curious etymological development, come to refer to Mizrahi Jews in Modern Hebrew and carries a strong pejorative connotation. Some linguists (among them Drs. Jan Tent and Paul Geraghty) have suggested that the Samoan and generic Polynesian term for Europeans, Palagi (pronounced Puh-LANG-ee) or Papalagi, might also be cognate, possibly a loan term gathered by early contact between Pacific islanders and Malays. See also Germanic Christianity List of Frankish kings List of Frankish queens Name of France List of Germanic peoples Frankokratia Notes Footnotes Sources Primary sources Fredegar Gregory of Tours Ammianus Marcellinus Procopius Secondary sources Bachrach,