In this talk, I will touch upon three or four issues in relation to the Occitan language of southern France: the place of Occitan among the Romance languages and the location of its speakers in French territory; a short history of this language since the Middle Ages up to its dialectal breaking up; and sociolinguistic reflections on the current situation (teaching, media, literature, music). I will be playing some audio samples from various genres, including songs and literary texts. Using the example of Occitan, I would like to present a little-known image of France: instead of a culturally uniform nation-state, I argue that it is a constitutively multi-ethnic country which has always denied its linguistic diversity. This was certainly the case with the greatest rival of French, the Occitan language (or "lenga d'Òc"), the poets of which (the troubadours) laid the foundations of modern European poetry through two innovations : versified stanza and idealized love. It is a language which earned a Nobel Prize for its poet Frederic Mistral in 1904 and which has never stopped to produce a great body of literature for one thousand years.

Hosted by "Romance Linguistics in the Antipodes'