Occitania
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Occitania refers to the lands where the Occitan language is spoken.
Occitania and Occitan language are retronyms. They were neologisms from the 19th century for the centuries-old set of Romance dialects that use òc for yes.
Geography
Occitania is composed of:
- The southern half of the French state: Provence, Drôme-Vivarais, Auvergne, Limousin, Guyenne, Gascony and Languedoc,
- The Occitan valleys in the Italian Аlps, where the Occitan language received legal status in 1999. These are fourteen Piedmontese valleys in the provinces of Cuneo and Torino, as well as in scattered mountain communities of the Liguria region (province of Imperia), and, unexpectedly, in one community (Guardia Piemontese) in the region of Calabria (province of Cosenza).
- The Aran valley, in the Pyrenees (Spanish state) where Occitan has been an official language since 1987.
Occitan or langue d'oc (lenga d'òc) is a Latin-based Romance language in the same way as Spanish, Italian or French. There are six main regional varieties with easy intercomprehension among them: Provençal (including Niçois spoken in the vicinity of Nice), Vivarais-alpine, Auvergnat, Limousin, Gascon (including Béarnais spoken in Béarn) and Languedocien. All those varieties of the Occitan language are written and valid. Standard Occitan is a synthesis.
Catalan is a language very similar to Occitan and there are quite strong historical and cultural links between Occitania and Catalonia.
Occitan history
Written texts in Occitan appeared in the 9th century: it was used at once in legal then literary, scientific and religious texts. The spoken dialects of Occitan are centuries older, revealed in toponyms, for instance.
From the division of Gallia Narbonensis in the 5th century, between Provence and Septimania Occitania was never politically united; though it was united by a common culture, it was divided among its bishops and abbots, its territorial counts, the self-governing communes of its walled cities, with a tangle of varying loyalties to nominal sovereigns: from the 9th to the 13th century, the dukes of Aquitaine, the counts of Foix, the counts of Toulouse and the Catalan kings rivalled in their attempts at controlling the various pays of Occitania.
The Occitan literature was glorious and flourishing at that time: in the 12th and 13th century, the troubadours invented courtly love (fin'amor) and the langue d'oc spread throughout all European cultivated circles. Actually, the terms langue d'oc, and Occitania appeared at the end of the 13th century.
But from the 13th to the 17th century, the French kings gradually conquered Occitania, sometimes slaughtering the population (one million people were killed during the Albigensian crusade).
The nobility and bourgeoisie started learning French while the people stuck to the langue d'oc. In 1539, Francis I issued the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts that imposed the use of French instead of Occitan in administration.
In 1789, the revolutionary committees tried to re-establish the autonomy of the «Midi» regions: they used the Occitan language but the Jacobin power neutralized them.
The 19th century witnessed a strong revival of the Occitan literature and the writer Frédéric Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904.
But from 1881 onwards, the children who spoke Occitan at school were punished in accordance with minister Jules Ferry's recommendations. That led to a depreciation of the language: everyone spoke Occitan in 1914, but French gained the upper hand during the 20th century. The situation got worse with the media excluding the use of the langue d'oc. In spite of that decline, the Occitan language is still alive and trying to gain fresh impetus...
