Occitan

Where it’s spoken

Occitan covers the historical “langue d’oc” region — southern France south of the Loire, Monaco, the Occitan Valleys of Piedmont in Italy, and the Val d’Aran in Catalonia, Spain (where it has co-official status as Aranese). Major dialect clusters include Provençal, Languedocien, Auvergnat, Limousin, and Gascon. About 220,000 people speak it daily; many more have passive knowledge.

What it sounds like

Occitan retains many features of Vulgar Latin lost in French — final vowels are pronounced, intervocalic consonants kept, and stress preserves Latin patterns. The phonology has nasalized vowels (less pervasive than French), the trilled “r,” and a characteristic open-mid vowel ɔ in unstressed syllables.

How it’s written

Two orthographic norms compete: the “classical” norm (Norme Classique) based on medieval troubadour spelling, and the “Mistralian” norm based on a 19th-century French-influenced system. The Latin alphabet is used with accent marks.

History

Occitan was the language of the medieval troubadours from the 11th–13th centuries — the original prestige Romance vernacular for European poetry. The 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts imposed French in administration, accelerating Occitan’s decline.