Tongue Tied I - the Crumbling Remnants of Occitan

The Box flag of Occitania. (Photo credits: Nimlar, via Wikimedia Commons)

‘Tongue Tied’ is a short tour through Europe via some of its most at-risk languages. In a series of four articles, Columnist Kieran McGreevy will examine four languages from across the corners of Europe, with the aim of showing what has led these languages to the brink of extinction (and sometimes back), by untying the history of the people, the linguistics of the language itself, and the efforts being made to keep these tongues alive. In the first instalment, Kieran looks at Occitan, its history, features, and efforts for revitalisation.

Fact File

Language Name:                                         

Occitan

Language family, subfamily:  

Indo-European, Romance

No. of speakers:                        

600,000 - 3,000,000

Geographical spread:              

Occitania, Southern France; Val d’Aran, Northwestern Catalonia; Piedmont and Liguria, Northwestern Italy; Monaco

History

It is likely that everyone reading this is somewhat familiar with France, as well as one of its most popular exports: the French language. With over twice as many second-language speakers as it has native speakers, French is the only language to be taught in schools in every country in the world, which means many of you will have to have tolerated the infuriatingly nonsensical orthography at some point in your early education. But the first sign of this impending and often sinister mass linguistic exodus actually began far sooner than many realise, before France resembled the modern nation it is today, and its first victim was Occitan.

Prior to the construction of l’Hexagone, the South of modern-day France was completely independent from the Île-de-France region to which medieval French kings were confined for many years before the start of the Albigensian crusade in the late 12th century. The first Romance language (derived from colloquial Latin) to possess its own literature was Occitan. In this corner of Europe, there was a thriving tradition of lyrical poetry amongst the trobadors, performed orally at first, but quickly being committed to paper (well, parchment) and inspiring other such traditions throughout Western Europe.

However, driven by religion as so many such wars and genocides were, the Albigensian crusade, at the behest of the Catholic Pope, was intended to wipe out a heretical Christian sect known as the Cathars in the Occitan-speaking South. As a result, many were massacred, and the Northmen who had led this slaughter in its latter days moved in to bolster the hugely diminished population.

This had several effects on the local tongue and its literary heritage. One result was the stifling of the artistic freedom of the troubadours, who approached subjects such as sex and love in a far less restrictive manner than their Northern, Catholic neighbours (and now overlords) appreciated as the various Christian Reformations approached. As time passed and nation states stabilised, the use of non-administrative languages like Occitan diminished – with an unhealthy amount of persecution from the French to help it on its way – until it reached the level that merits its endangered status today.

Features

Occitan in many ways is like the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) that you might have encountered in school,. Here are some features, however, that make it a little different from its brothers and sisters:

• While French feminine nouns and adjectives are often recognizable through the final -e, in most Romance languages – including Occitan – this is a final -a. From masculine nouns and adjectives, you can derive a feminine form, by changing the final vowel to, or adding, that final -a. This is often accompanied, however, in Occitan, by voicing of the preceding consonant, which is just a technical way of saying the throat (more specifically the vocal cords) vibrate when making the sound. For example:

  un polit nebot ‘a beautiful nephew’ → una polida neboda ‘a beautiful niece’

• Luckily for any Anglophones looking to learn the language, Occitan follows the Western Romance rule for forming the plural (we’re lumping French in here for convenience) – adding an -s – rather than the Eastern (plus Italian) tendency to change the vowels around. Of course, there are some exceptions, but let’s look on the bright side:

  femna ‘woman’ → femnas ‘women’         arbust ‘bush’ → arbustes ‘bushes’

• Generally, as is hotly debated among speakers of these languages, with the rise in Western awareness of non-binary people, there is not a great deal of room for gender neutrality in Romance in the same way that it is inherently available in English, which doesn’t have grammatical gender. Occitan however, in some of its pronouns, does present this option. Nevertheless, it is generally used with the English meaning of ‘it’ and is only available as a singular direct object – e.g., I eat it – or in the singular form of possessive pronouns (which can be used as adjectives) – e.g., They’re my partner.

  lo ‘him’ → o ‘it (them)’                                    çò mieu ‘my/mine’

Revitalisation

Perhaps surprisingly, although most of Occitania lies in modern-day France, it is also the state that has been the most hostile to the regional language, being the only country out of Italy, Spain and itself to not recognise Occitan as either a co-official language or a protected minority language in the relevant regions.

In Spain, in Val d’Aran, Occitan is taught in schools and some teaching is conducted in the language, with public authorities even financing Occitan newspapers and books, while in France, it is largely treated by officials like an unpopular foreign language in any kind of educational setting. That leaves most of the work to a small set of devoted activists within France. Many of the active speakers of the language are elderly members of the population, who may not even be well-acquainted with Occitan in its written form, which has only been valorised more recently by intellectuals and younger cultural activists.

There are two writing forms in circulation: the Classical norm, which is based on that of Medieval Occitan and better reflects both its difference from French and similarities to Catalan, to which the orthography is very similar; and the Mistralian norm, which is more similar to French, which makes it more accessible, as most Occitan speakers are literate in French, particularly those speakers of the Provençal or Niçard dialects that tend to use it.

Occitan, due to its less vigorous standardisation and regulation by a government body, is spoken in a dialect continuum from the North of Italy, through Southern France and into the parts of Spain where it is used, so orthography is often chosen based on which best suits the variety spoken (Western dialects like Gascon or Aranese, for example, will more closely resemble Catalan or Spanish).

Overall, Occitan is lucky among endangered languages, as its rich literary heritage (which had the fortune of being recorded in writing), has piqued interest among the descendants of its medieval speakers. This has encouraged recovery efforts from the population of a nation that is otherwise indifferent. If this column or the language itself have encouraged you to learn a little more, or experience a little of the region’s cultural output, you can find some links here:

https://youtu.be/GPaZb-MzzpQ - Speaker of Nissart Occitan

https://youtu.be/boFQzRB3OuQ - Speaker of Aranese Occitan

https://youtu.be/D99-KyR5YIg - Medieval Trobador music

https://youtu.be/2Z5yUrticMs - Video series for learning Occitan

https://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Occitan/Grammar/index.html - Descriptive grammar of Occitan