Occitan language

• 1. Introduction

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  Occitan is a Romance language named after one small word, òc, which means yes. The Italian poet Dante used that word to sketch a map of European languages. In his Latin treatise De vulgari eloquentia he wrote: "nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil." In English, that is "for some say òc, others sì, yet others say oïl." Three words for yes stood for three major literary languages that were well known in Italy. The òc language is the one this documentary follows. Today it survives mostly in southern France, with smaller pockets in other countries. The region where it is spoken is sometimes called Occitania. Here is the puzzle. Occitan has no official status in France, the country that is home to most of its speakers. How did a language with such a long literary pedigree end up in that position? Why do scholars still argue over whether it is one language or several? And who is working to keep it alive?

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• 2. A Word for Yes

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  The word òc descends from the Vulgar Latin word hoc, which meant "this." French took a different road. Its old word oïl grew from the Latin phrase hoc illud, "this is it." Most other Romance languages built their yes on the Latin sic, roughly "thus." That gave Spanish sí, Italian sì, Portuguese sim and Eastern Lombard sé. Old Catalan also had hoc, and so does the Catalan of Northern Catalonia today. Modern Catalan keeps oi, a relative of òc, which sometimes ends a yes-or-no question.

  French keeps a small echo of this divide in the word si, used to say yes to a question asked in the negative. Asked "Vous n'avez pas de frères?" a speaker can answer "Si, j'en ai sept." That means "You don't have any brothers, do you?" "Yes I do, I have seven."

  The name Occitan itself arrived late. Around 1300 it was recorded as occitanus, a crossing of oc and aquitanus, meaning Aquitanian. For many centuries, people called the language Limousin or Provençal instead, after two regions inside its territory. The philologist Joseph Anglade credited the Catalan troubadour Raimon Vidal de Besalú with the first use of Lemosin for the language, at the start of the 13th century. In his Razós de trobar, Vidal judged French better for romances and pastourelles. He thought the language of Limousin better for poems and songs, and said its literature carried more authority than any other speech in the lands where his tongue was spoken.

  Provençal had its own odd history. In the 11th and 12th centuries, and sometimes the 13th, Provence could mean the whole old Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis and even Aquitaine. The term first came into fashion in Italy. After Frédéric Mistral's Félibrige movement in the 19th century, Provençal won the greatest literary recognition and became the most popular name. Anglade then helped establish the then archaic word Occitan as the standard one. Linguists now reserve Provençal and Limousin for particular varieties, though many non-specialists still call the whole language Provençal.

  The authority Raimon Vidal claimed rested on poetry, and the poets who earned it were the troubadours.

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• 3. Voice of the Troubadours

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  Around the year 780, a Carolingian litany had its leader singing in Latin while the people answered in Old Occitan: "Ora pro nos; Tu lo juva." One of the oldest written fragments of the language dates to 960. It mixes Latin with Occitan and names Ermengaus, Froterius and Raimundus. Then came longer works. The Boecis is a poem of 258 lines, written entirely in the Limousin dialect between 1000 and 1030 and inspired by Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. The Cançó de Santa Fe dates to roughly 1054-1076. The Romance of Flamenca belongs to the 13th century, and the Song of the Albigensian Crusade to about 1213-1219.

  The troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz, made Occitan the vehicle for influential poetry. At that time the language was understood and celebrated throughout most of educated Europe. It was the maternal language of the English queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was also the mother tongue of her sons, the kings Richard I and John. Richard wrote troubadour poetry himself.

  Dante gave Occitan one of its most famous cameos. In the 26th canto of his Purgatorio, the troubadour Arnaut Daniel answers the narrator in the language. "Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan," he says, which the English version renders as "I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go."

  Later writers kept borrowing the language. Victor Hugo's Les Misérables contains some Occitan in its account of Monseigneur Bienvenu. The 16th-century Spanish playwright Lope de Rueda put a comic Gascon servant into his short piece La generosa paliza. Kate Mosse's best-selling 2005 novel Labyrinth is set in Carcassonne, where she owns a house and spends half of each year. John Barnes and Michael Crichton also feature Occitan in their fiction.

  The French composer Joseph Canteloube made five sets of folk songs called Songs of the Auvergne. Their lyrics are in the Auvergne dialect, and the orchestration tries to conjure vivid pastoral scenes of yesteryear.

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• 4. Roots and Structure

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  In 121 BC, the Romans established a presence in southern France, starting with Gallia Narbonensis. According to the scholar Müller, "France's linguistic separation began with Roman influence." The seeds of Occitan were first sown there. Geography then helped the language stay distinct. Its range is bounded by the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Massif Central, the Alps and the Pyrenees. Arid land, marshes and ground poorly suited to farming added buffer zones, such as the territory between the Loire and the Garonne. Some Occitan-speaking peoples descend from people who have lived in the region since prehistoric times.

  The vocabulary tells a similar story. Occitan sits midway between the Gallo-Romance and Iberian Romance languages. Yet it has around 550 words inherited from Latin that no longer exist in the langues d'oïl or in Franco-Provençal. The Frankish lexicon and its phonetic influence often stop above the line that divides oc from oïl.

  Jules Ronjat tried to pin the language down with 19 principal criteria. Eleven are phonetic, five morphological, one syntactic and two lexical. Sixteen of them differ from French, twelve from Franco-Provençal, eight from Italian and seven from Spanish. Close rounded vowels are rare or absent in Occitan, and that trait carries into the distinctive accent of Occitan speakers when they speak French. Occitan also lets speakers drop the subject pronoun, so canti means "I sing" and cantas means "you sing." Negation adds the word pas after the verb, as in Parli pas, "I don't speak."

  The lexicon is rich. Lo Panoccinari, considered the most comprehensive dictionary ever published in the language, records over 250,000 unique words. It records more than 310,000 once dialectal variations are counted. The magazine Géo reported 128 synonyms related to cultivated land, 62 for wetlands and 75 for sunshine. The language went through an eclipse during the Industrial Revolution, as the vocabulary of the countryside lost importance and the language was disparaged as a patois.

  When the World Wide Web arrived, Occitan answered with its own word for it: oèb.

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• 5. Beyond the Border

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  At the end of the 11th century, Franks began entering the Iberian Peninsula along the Ways of St. James, through Somport and Roncesvalles. They settled in the Kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon, drawn by privileges that the Navarrese kings granted them. In Pamplona, Sangüesa and Estella-Lizarra they formed ethnic boroughs where Occitan was the language of daily life. These communities may have stayed close-knit and resisted assimilating into the predominantly Basque-speaking population. From the early 13th century to the late 14th century, their language became the status language of the Navarrese kings, nobility and upper classes. They used it for official and trade purposes.

  Written administrative records followed a koiné based on the Languedocien dialect of Toulouse. A written account from Pamplona survives about the burning of the borough of San Nicolas in 1258. The History of the War of Navarre by Guilhem Anelier, dated 1276, was written in Pamplona and shows a variant from Toulouse.

  Aragon went differently. Occitan there competed with the rising local Romance vernacular, Navarro-Aragonese, especially after Aragonese conquests southward to Zaragoza, Huesca and Tudela between 1118 and 1134. A second wave of Occitan immigrants was absorbed by that similar language. In the 14th century, Occitan across the southern Pyrenean area fell into decay. Navarro-Aragonese absorbed it first, and Castilian did so in the 15th century. The exclusive boroughs broke up, and Pamplona's were unified in 1423.

  In the early 12th century, the Navarrese kings called Gascon-speaking communities to the coast from San Sebastian to the river Bidasoa, for trading purposes. They spoke a Béarnese dialect of Gascon. It lasted there until the 19th century, because Donostia and Pasaia kept close ties with Bayonne. Back in the 12th and 13th centuries, Catalan troubadours such as Guerau de Cabrera, Guilhem de Bergadan, Guilhem de Cabestany, Huguet de Mataplana, Cerverí de Girona, Formit de Perpinhan and Jofre de Foixà wrote in Occitan too.

  In the Val d'Aran, in the northwest corner of Catalonia, a variety of Gascon called Aranese is an official language alongside Catalan and Spanish. Since September 2010, the Parliament of Catalonia has treated Aranese Occitan as the officially preferred language there. The Val d'Aran status adopted in 1990 describes Aranese as part of Gascon and Occitan. Italy adopted a Linguistic Minorities Protection Law in 1999, known as Law 482, which includes Occitan. In the Occitan Valleys of Piedmont, Italian remains dominant. In the southern province of Cosenza, at Guardia Piemontese in Calabria, a variety called Gardiol has existed since the 14th century. It is considered a separate Occitanic language. In Monaco, Occitan once coexisted with the native Monégasque Ligurian.

  Smaller communities scattered further. Occitan-speaking colonies existed in Württemberg from the 18th century, after the Camisard war, and the last speakers were heard in the 1930s. Speakers exist in Valdese, North Carolina, and in Quebec, which has associations such as Association Occitane du Québec. A few settlers reached Guanajuato in Mexico in the 19th century.

  In the late 19th century, 165 Occitans from the area around Rodez and Aveyron founded a community in Pigüé, Argentina.

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• 6. Centuries of Pressure

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  In 1539, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts decreed that the langue d'oïl should be used for all French administration. At the time, that meant the Francien language rather than the broader group of oïl dialects. Occitan had already lost status from the 14th century onward, as French royal power gradually imposed itself on its territory. Its greatest decline came during the French Revolution, when diversity of language was seen as a threat.

  A revival came near the end of the 19th century. Frédéric Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904, was among those involved. In 1903, the four Gospels were translated into the Provençal spoken in Cannes and Grasse, under the title Lis Evangèli, with the Roman Catholic Imprimatur. World War I then dampened the movement, because many Occitan speakers spent long stretches alongside French-speaking comrades. In the early 1900s, the French government also tried to restrict the use and teaching of minority languages in public schools, Occitan among them. Bilingual education only returned for regions with unique languages in 1993.

  The numbers show the toll. In 1860, Occitan speakers made up more than 39% of the whole French population. They were still 26% to 36% in the 1920s, and fewer than 7% in 1993. Twelve to fourteen million people fully spoke it in 1921. The area where it was historically dominant has about 16 million inhabitants now, and recent research suggests roughly 789,000 people may speak it as a first language across France, Italy, Spain and Monaco. A 1999 census counted 610,000 native speakers in France, almost all of them also native French speakers. A 2020 study by the Office Public de la Langue Occitane estimated about 540,000 speakers in Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie. That survey was conducted in Occitan, and it left out Auvergne and Provence because the Office has no partnership there.

  The word Vergonha names the shame produced by generations of systematic suppression and humiliation. Speakers seldom use the language in front of strangers. Outsiders from the north are often called Parisiens or Nordistes. Elderly rural speakers generally switch to French when dealing with outsiders. In Béarn, a late addition to the Kingdom of France, the decline is somewhat less pronounced. The village of Artix chose to post street signs in the local language. Since late 2009, Toulouse Metro announcements have been bilingual in French and Occitan. Occitan activists, called Occitanists, have opened Occitan-language preschools called Calandretas to bring the language back to the young.

  The UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages classifies four of the six major dialects as severely endangered. It lists the remaining two as definitely endangered.

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• 7. Dialects and Disputes

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  Specialists commonly divide Occitan into six main dialects: Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin, Auvergnat, Provençal and Vivaro-Alpine. Gascon includes Béarnese and Aranese. Provençal includes the Niçard subdialect. In practice, every settlement technically has its own speech, and the whole of Occitania forms a dialect continuum that shifts gradually along any path across it. The northern and eastern dialects share features with the Gallo-Italic and Oïl languages, such as nasal vowels and the loss of final consonants. The southernmost ones share features with the Ibero-Romance languages, such as the merging of /b/ and /v/.

  The word for house shows how tangled the map is. Gascon and Niçard both say maison, a cognate of French, even though they lie closer to Spain and Italy. Other dialects say casa, like Catalan and Spanish. Mutual intelligibility remains high, and some dialects use both forms as synonyms.

  Gascon is the most divergent. It turns Latin initial /f/ into /h/, as in hilh, and it loses /n/ between vowels. The linguist Max Wheeler notes that "probably only its copresence within the French cultural sphere has kept Gascon from being regarded as a separate language." Wheeler groups the dialects into a conservative southwestern pair, Gascon and Languedocien, and an innovative northeastern set. Pierre Bec instead proposed three groups, with Gascon standing alone.

  Three Jewish dialects of Occitan have also gone extinct. Judeo-Gascon was spoken by Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Gascony, and it carried many Hebrew loanwords. It died out after World War 2, with elderly Jews in Bayonne as the last speakers. About 850 of its unique words passed into Southern Jewish French. Judeo-Provençal declined after Jews were expelled from Provence in 1498 and was probably gone by the 20th century. Judeo-Niçard is known from only a few documents of the 19th century. Southern Jewish French, which was shaped by all three, is now spoken by an estimated 50 to 100 people.

  The question of what counts as one language runs deeper. Most scholars hold that Occitan is a single language. A minority reject even the name and see a family of distinct lengas d'òc. Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century, and it remains the closest relative. The linguist Pierre Bec called the two together Occitano-Romance.

  Two recent studies have pushed Gascon toward separate status. Stephan Koppelberg applied a statistics-based approach for the first time and concluded that Catalan, Occitan and Gascon are three distinct languages. Y. Greub and J.P. Chambon of Sorbonne University showed that Proto-Gascon was complete by the eve of the 7th century, while Proto-Occitan was not yet formed. Both backed the early intuition of the late Kurt Baldinger, a specialist in medieval Occitan and medieval Gascon, who had recommended classing the two as separate languages.

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• 8. Spelling Wars

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  In 1935, Louis Alibert published his Gramatica occitana segon los parlars lengadocians, a grammar of the Languedocien dialect. It launched the effort to standardize Occitan. His French-Occitan dictionary followed in 1966. During the 1970s, Pierre Bec worked on Gascon and Robèrt Lafont on Provençal. The standard that emerged is called occitan larg, or wide Occitan, and it admits soft regional adaptations. The process is still unfinished. Some speakers reject it altogether, because they do not think a language so rooted in speech can be standardized the way others are.

  Two main spelling systems compete. The classical norm is based on medieval Occitan and works for every dialect. It lets speakers of different dialects write for one another. The word for day is jorn in the classical norm, but a Mistralian writer might spell it jour, joun, journ or even yourn, depending on origin. The Mistralian norm takes its name from Frédéric Mistral. It follows modern French spelling and is used mostly for Provençal and Niçard. It writes ou for the sound that the classical norm writes o. So Poland is Polonha in the classical system and Poulougno in the Mistralian one.

  Two smaller norms exist. The Escòla dau Pò norm is a simplified Mistralian system used only in the Occitan Valleys of Italy. The Bonnaudian norm, also called écriture auvergnate unifiée, was created by Pierre Bonnaud and is used only for Auvergnat. The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows the differences. In classical Languedocien it begins "Totas las personas naisson liuras e egalas en dignitat e en drech." In Mistralian Provençal it reads "Tóuti li persouno naisson liéuro e egalo en dignita e en dre."

  The quarrel over Provençal's status should not be confused with the quarrel over its spelling. Supporters of the classical orthography consider Provençal part of Occitan. Users of Mistralian spelling are divided on the point.

  Spelling also separates Occitan from Catalan. Catalan writes the sound /ʎ/ as ll and /ɲ/ as ny. Occitan writes them lh and nh. Occitan libre corresponds to Catalan llibre, and the second person plural ends in -tz in Occitan but -u in Catalan.

  Wherever Portuguese is written with lh and nh, a trace of classical Occitan survives. The spelling was presumably brought there by Gerald of Braga, a monk from Moissac who became bishop of Braga in 1047.

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