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The Occitans (Occitan: occitans) are a Romance-speaking ethnic group originating in the historical region of Occitania (southern France, northeastern Spain, and northwestern Italy and Monaco). They have been also called Gascons, Provençals, and Auvergnats.
Occitan (English: / ˈ ɒ k s ɪ t ən,-t æ n,-t ɑː n /; Occitan: occitan [utsiˈta, uksiˈta]), also known as lenga d'òc (Occitan: [ˈleŋɡɔ ˈðɔ(k)] ⓘ; French: langue d'oc) by its native speakers, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as ...
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- Toponymies
- Historiography of The Occitania Concept
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The extent of Occitania may vary according to the criteria used: 1. Based on a geolinguistic definition, Occitania is the area of Occitan language as surveyed at the end fof the XIXth century.The formerly Occitanophone regions are not included. On the other hand one always speaks Occitan in the French Basque Country and in the Catalan Countries (th...
Occitania comes from the medieval Latin Occitania. The first part of the name, Occ-, comes from Occitan òc and the expression langue d'oc, in Italian lingua d'oc. It is an appellation promoted by Dante Alighieri of Occitan by the way of saying "yes" in Old Occitan-Catalan; as opposed to the "langue de si" (Italian) and the "langue d'oïl" (Old Frenc...
The langue d'ocis a territorialized language, that is to say, spoken mainly on a territory whose boundaries can be described. This part attempts to describe the origins of the Occitanie concept, the different names that this territory has taken and the creation of the modern concept of Occitania.
Occitania includes the following regions: 1. The southern half of France: Provence, Drôme-Vivarais, Auvergne, Limousin, Guyenne, Gascony, southern Dauphiné and Languedoc. French is now the dominant language in this area, where Occitan is not recognized as an official language. 2. The Occitan Valleys in the Italian Аlps, where the Occitan language r...
Written texts in Occitan appeared in the 10th century: it was first used in legal texts, and then in literary, scientific, and religious texts. Spoken dialects of Occitan are many centuries older and appeared as soon as the 8th century, at least, as revealed through toponyms and Occitanized words left in Latinmanuscripts. Occitania was often politi...
Although not really a colony in a modern sense, there was an Occitan enclave in the County of Tripoli, founded in 1102 by Raymond IV of Toulouse during the Crusades north of Jerusalem. Most people in this county came from Occitania and Italy. Around the 14th century, some "Provençal" settlements were founded by Valdenses in Ssouthern Italy: the Cap...
Occitanist associations or organizations
The oldest Occitanist association is the Felibritge, founded in 1854. In 1945, after the Second World War, some of the association's members founded a distinct movement, the Institut d'Estudis Occitans(Institute of Occitan Studies). The main movements in France are as follows: 1. Felibritgehistorical Mistralian, literary and linguistic movement. 2. Institut d'Estudis Occitans(IEO), maintenance and development of the Occitan language and culture as a whole. 3. Calandreta, private associations...
There are 14 to 16 million inhabitants in Occitania today. According to the 1999 census, there are 610,000 native speakers and another million people with some exposure to the language. Native speakers of Occitan are to be found mostly in the older generations. The Institut d'Estudis Occitans (IEO) has been modernizing the Occitan language since 19...
The Occitan language is only recognized as official, protected and promoted in the Val d'Aran (in Spain); in Italy it has the status of a protected language; and in Franceit only has acceptance in the educational network but without legal recognition. The Fédération des langues régionales pour l'enseignement publiccalculated the number of students ...
The troubadour school first marked the emergence of a distinct Occitan culture during the High Middle Ages. The troubadours were highly appreciated for their refined lyricism and influenced many ot...Occitan literature experienced a rebirth during the Baroque period, mainly in Gascony through the Béarnese dialect. Indeed, Béarnese was the mother-tongue Henry IV of France, whose designation spar...Frédéric Mistral and his Félibrige school marked the renewal of the Occitan language in literature in the middle of the 19th century. Mistral won the 1904 Nobel Prize in literature, illustrating th...- 198,113 km² (76,492 sq mi)
- 16.1 million
- Europe
Old Occitan (Modern Occitan: occitan ancian, Catalan: occità antic), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan.
- 8th–14th centuries
Occitan is a Romance language spoken mainly in southern France, and also in Monaco, in the Aran Valley ( Val d'Aran) in northern Spain, and in the Occitan Valleys ( Valadas Occitanas) in Italy. There are perhaps 1.5 million people who speak Occitan in their daily lives, while 5 or 6 million people are able to speak the language.
Occitan language, modern name given by linguists to a group of dialects that form a Romance language that was spoken in the early 21st century by about 1,500,000 people in southern France, though many estimates range as low as one-third that number. The UNESCO Red Book lists some of the dialects of Occitan as “seriously endangered.”
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The Occitans (Occitan: occitans) are a Romance-speaking Mediterranean ethnic group. They come from the historical region of Occitania (southern France, northeastern Spain and northwestern Italy). Just to clarify: virtually everyone in France speaks French. Some speak another language also.