22 Facts About Occitan language

Some include Catalan in Occitan, as the distance between this language and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects.

Since September 2010, the Parliament of Catalonia has considered Aranese Occitan to be the officially preferred language for use in the Val d'Aran.

Unlike other Romance languages such as French or Spanish, there is no single written standard language called "Occitan", and Occitan has no official status in France, home to most of Occitania.

Many centuries, the Occitan language dialects were referred to as Limousin or Provencal, after the names of two regions lying within the modern Occitan language-speaking area.

French Occitan language is worthier and better suited for romances and pastourelles; but that from Limousin is of greater value for writing poems and cancons and sirventes; and across the whole of the lands where our tongue is spoken, the literature in the Limousin Occitan language has more authority than any other dialect, wherefore I shall use this name in priority.

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One of the oldest written fragments of the Occitan language found dates back to 960, in an official text that was mixed with Latin:.

Literary renaissance of the late 19th century was attenuated by World War I, when Occitan language speakers spent extended periods of time alongside French-speaking comrades.

The Occitan language in turn became the status Occitan language chosen by the Navarrese kings, nobility, and upper classes for official and trade purposes in the period stretching from the early 13th century to late 14th century.

The Occitan language fell into decay in the 14th century across the whole southern Pyrenean area and became largely absorbed into Navarro-Aragonese first and Castilian later in the 15th century, after their exclusive boroughs broke up .

The language variant used was different from the ones used in Navarre, i e a Bearnese dialect of Gascon, with Gascon being in use far longer than in Navarre and Aragon until the 19th century, thanks mainly to the close ties held by Donostia and Pasaia with Bayonne.

Nevertheless, there is a burgeoning movement in regions of France where Occitan was widely spoken to introduce educational programs to encourage young people in these regions to learn the language.

Occitan language is still spoken by many elderly people in rural areas, but they generally switch to French when dealing with outsiders.

Occitan's decline is somewhat less pronounced in Bearn because of the province's history, though even there the language is little spoken outside the homes of the rural elderly.

Max Wheeler notes that "probably only its copresence within the French cultural sphere has kept [Gascon] from being regarded as a separate language", and compares it to Franco-Provencal, which is considered a separate language from Occitan but is "probably not more divergent from Occitan overall than Gascon is".

All regional varieties of the Occitan language have a written form; thus, Occitan can be considered as a pluricentric language.

Several IETF Occitan language subtags have been registered for the different orthographies:.

Many Occitan linguists and writers, particularly those involved with the pan-Occitan movement centered on the Institut d'Estudis Occitans, disagree with the view that Occitan is a family of languages; instead they believe Limousin, Auvergnat, Languedocien, Gascon, Provencal and Vivaro-Alpine are dialects of a single language.

Gascon presents a number of significant differences from the rest of the language; but, despite these differences, Gascon and other Occitan dialects have very important common lexical and grammatical features, so authors such as Pierre Bec argue that they could never be considered as different as, for example, Spanish and Italian.

Nevertheless, other scholars point out that the process that led to the affirmation of Catalan as a distinct language from Occitan started during the period when the pressure to include Catalan-speaking areas in a mainstream Spanish culture was at its greatest.

For example, Occitan language has 128 synonyms related to cultivated land, 62 for wetlands, and 75 for sunshine .

The Occitan language went through an eclipse during the Industrial Revolution, as the vocabulary of the countryside became less important.

Nevertheless, Occitan language has incorporated new words into its lexicon to describe the modern world.