© Richard Randall

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Occitan

Before 1789, France was a loose community of regions, each with its own languages and dialects: Alsatian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and perhaps 70 more. Occitan was the family of languages from Occitanie, the region that stretched from Bordeaux and the PyrenÈes in the southwest to the Alps and northern Italy in the southeast. It and its several variants were linked to a rich creative history, particularly in literature and song.

Then came the French Revolution, and then Napoleon, and a new constitution that declared France "one people, one nation, one language." Occitan all but disappeared.

But not completely. More than 200 years later, Occitan is still spoken in the French countryside and in the north of Italy, where it's recognized as an official regional language. (A 2001 attempt by the French culture ministry to recognize regional languages was rejected by the country's constitutional council.) No one really knows how many people use Occitan regularly because the French government has never done a survey. Unofficial estimates suggest that several hundred thousand speak one or another form of Occitan as a private, or "intimate" language, at home and among close friends. Almost nowhere in France is it used in the workplace.

The traditional flag of Provence. ProvenÁal is the best-known of the Occitan languages. Petrarch and Dante both used it in their writing.

Even the Occitan accent is effectively banned from public life. If one wants to get ahead in the French civil service, one must drop one's Occitan or ProvenÁal inflections. (ProvenÁal is perhaps the most widely used variant of Occitan.) Today just a handful of private secondary schools offer classes in Occitan. A few cultural groups, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning 19th century ProvenÁal poet FrÈdÈric Mistral, quietly promote the language and literature.

The most visible-and audible-proponents of Occitan today are not linguists or history buffs, but contemporary musicians. These are no purists: their music blends modern folk music, the music of the medieval troubadors, Brazilian rhythms and, most notably, Jamaican reggae. The two groups featured in this piece-the Fabulous Trobadors from Toulouse and Massilia Sound System from Marseille-play highly danceable music whose often-humorous (and often-political) lyrics mix French with Occitan, so as not to alienate French-speaking audiences. Other groups add a dose of Beur, the popular Arabic spoken by North Africans all over France.

The result is a music that borrows cheerfully across centuries and borders-but that signals an increasingly serious disenchantment with the suppression of regional identities, languages and culture

Occitan Language

General Overview

 Area of Distribution and Number of Speakers

Occitan language (also called ProvenÁal or Languedoc) is a Romance language spoken by about 1,500,000 people in southern France. All Occitan speakers use French as their official and cultural language, but Occitan dialects are used for everyday purposes and show no signs of extinction.

The name Occitan is derived from the geographical name Occitania, which is itself patterned after Aquitania and the characteristic word oc and includes the regions of Limousin, Languedoc, the old Aquitaine, and the southern part of the French Alps, all of the populations of which are Occitan-speaking. The name Languedoc comes from the term langue d' oc, which denoted a language using oc for yes (from Latin hoc), in contrast to the French language, the langue d' oÔl, which used oÔl (modern oui) for yes (from Latin hoc ille). Languedoc refers to a linguistic and political-geographical region of the southern Massif Central in France. The name ProvenÁal originally referred to the Occitan dialects of the Provence region and is used also to refer to the standardized medieval literary language based on the dialect of Provence.

Origin and History

Occitan's medieval ancestor, usually called either ProvenÁal or Langue d'Oc, was the first literary dialect of high culture in the territory now encompassed by France. It developed, as did Francien (ancestor of modern French), from the Vulgar Latin transmitted by Roman soldiers and traders to local populations. According to EncyclopÈdie Occitane, ProvenÁal was actually the first Romance language to emerge from the mix of Roman and "barbarian" tongues; the earliest surviving texts in Langue d'Oc can be definitively attributed to the tenth century (a refrain attached to a Latin poem), and the 12th-century Donat provenÁal was the first grammar of a modern European language. The best-known ambassadors of Occitan were the troubadours, traveling minstrels who created enduring lyric poetry and canso, inventing and disseminating the idea of courtly love. Although Occitania was composed of small feudal polities, the Langue d'Oc benefited in medieval times from a common orthography, serving admirably as a language of philosophy, science, law and the arts, as well as the everyday dialect of its speakers. This usage continued well into the 14th century, and Occitan's eventual decline is closely tied to the evolution of royal power and the French state.

Although most of Occitania was added to the territory of the French crown by the 15th century (excepting English holdings), the French language did not begin to supplant Occitan for some time. The  Edict of Villers-CotterÍts (1539) made French the official language of government and legal documents, superseding Latin as well as the more than 30 diverse Celtic and Romance local dialects spoken by the majority of the populace

This set the stage for the association of French with privilege and power, as bourgeoisie, nobles and courtiers alike were drawn to French, the language of king and government; French also came to be the language of culture for the Occitan elite, lending words of politesse to the Occitan vocabulary. However, the Ancien RÈgime did not invest much effort in the enforcement of this edict. The official policy of at least the earliest Capetian rulers of Occitania allowed translation of documents on a local level, proving that the royal authority was not bent on imposing its own language.The encroachment of French began slowly, following trade routes and, like the shift from "tu" to "vous" pronoun usage, filtering from highest to lowest elements of society. Courtiers wishing to curry favor with the new crown in Ile-de-France chose to speak French; bourgeoisie, entrepreneurs, and the burgeoning class of governmental functionaries also found French bilingualism to be in their best interest.

Dialects

The modern dialects of Occitan are little changed from the speech of the Middle Ages, although they are being affected by their constant exposure to French. The dialects are classified in three major groups:

… Northern Occitan, which encompasses the three main dialects of Limousin (higher), Auvergnat (lower), and ProvenÁal Alpine.

… Southern or Middle Occitan, which is divided primarily into Languedocien with northern, southern, eastern and western dialects, and ProvenÁal to the east with three main subdivisions of Rhodanian around Arles, Avignon and NÓmes, and Provencal Maritime spoken around the Cote d'Azur, and NiÁart spoken around Nice.

… Gascon spoken primarily in southwestern France; it is sometimes considered a distinct language because it differs a great deal from the other, more or less uniform, Occitan dialects.

Occitan is closely related to Catalan, and, although strongly influenced in the recent past by French, its phonology and grammar are more closely related to Spanish than to French.

Standardization

In spite of the various dialects, attempts were made to create an Occitan standard. One of the earliest and most famous movements was founded by FrÈdÈric Mistral, the region's best-known author, who was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for the poem "MirËilha" in his native ProvenÁal dialect.

Mistral, together with a group of intellectuals known as the FÈlibrige, proposed in the 19th century a standard based upon modern ProvenÁal (one of the Occitan dialects). The FÈlibrigians' preoccupation with purity and the past meant that the "corrupted, bastardized form of the frenchified patois of the streets' could not provide a suitable linguistic model for their poetry. That had to be found elsewhere, in the countryside." They re-worked the language, systematically pruning "frenchified"terms and replacing them with "older and more genuine" forms.

The FÈlibrigians are most often accused of passÈisme, of wishing to preserve, from the safety of their ivory tower of intellectualism, the picturesque backwardness of Occitania, and of seeking in folkloric traditions a force to unite Occitania.

A post-World War II effort at standardization took as its model the Languedocien dialect; like the FÈlibrigian standard, the choice of one dialect as a model for all could only have overruled dialectical loyalty in a few urban intellectuals whose linguistic ties to the region were more symbolic or political than quotidian and authentic. There have been a confusing array of other standardizations, many of which have suffered in some degree from the crucial gap between urban intellectuals who seek to preserve and standardize Occitan, and rural paysans, the last remaining autochthonous native speakers, whose goals are more concrete and practical.

The FÈlibrigian spelling is still in use, primarily in the ProvenÁal region, but current Occitan texts tend to favor LoÌs AlibËrt's Languedocien-based Gramatica occitana. His system, based upon the spelling and Latin derivations of historical Langue d'Oc, is sufficiently universal to enable the expression of every Occitan dialect, as well as autochthonic neologisms. The ´graphie alibertineª is on its way to unite the dialects of Occitan; transcriptional conventions can now be regularized, and the historical roots of the system lend modern writing historical continuity and even a sense of the prestige of the medieval precedent. In Saussurean terms, Alibert's norms permit both synchronic communication, throughout Occitania, and diachronic communication back to the origins of Occitan culture.

Present Situation

The situation of present-day Occitan is rather paradoxical. On the one hand, there are people, mainly old, who still use it in every day life as their natural way of communication, at work or at home. Yet those people, for the most, are unable to read or write it as they never learned to do so. On the other hand, due to the movements and associations supporting the revival of minority languages in Europe and in France, Occitan is more and more taught in bilingual associative schools (Calandretas), in state-run primary schools, in high schools and Universities. Yet what is at issue now, is whether those people, who will be able to read and write Occitan, will use it in everyday life.