Occitan 101 - 1
Hello! As some of you might have understood, I study Occitan at university, and I wanted to share my love of the language here, so here we go!
What’s Occitan?
It is a romance language, a descendant of Latin, just like French, Spanish or Italian. It is spoken through Southern France, Spain, Italy and Monaco, and is closely related to Catalan. It’s an official language in Catalonia (Spain), and has been recognised as a minority language in France and Italy.
It did not have the political power of French and Spanish, nor the cultural importance of Italian, so it got relegated to the rank of “patois”. I’m not sure what that word means in English, but in French it’s a sub-language. It’s less that a language. A insult. A bit like “language (derogatory)”. It is a full fleshed language, but French did try to kill it, and the small efforts made to revive it did not help much much. According the the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages, Occitan dialects are either Severely or Definitely Endangered.
Occitan counts 6 dialects to this day. There used to be a seventh dialect: judeo-occitan, which is dead. Catalan has also been considered a dialect of Occitan at some point, but now they’re two different languages of the same family. We can consider that these 6 dialects can be grouped in two groups. Five are quite similar, and then Gascon stands out - it’s the one that shows the most differences - and there are sort of sub-dialects as people don’t exactly speak the same Occitan throughout the Gascon region.
I chose to learn Gascon, which is one of the two definitely endangered dialects :) So this is the one I will share here!
Adishatz!