Occitan

When the Roman legions marched into Gaul in the first century BCE, they planted the seed of what would become one of the most radiant literary languages in medieval Europe. The Latin spoken by settlers and soldiers in the southern provinces — Narbonensis, Aquitania, Viennensis — began to drift away from both classical Latin and from the varieties spoken further north. The key vowels shifted, certain endings dropped, and the word for yes became oc rather than oïl. That small syllable would eventually name the language itself: la lenga d'òc, the tongue of oc.

Between roughly 1000 and 1250 CE, Occitan exploded into Europe's first great vernacular literary tradition. The troubadours — poet-musicians of extraordinary sophistication — composed in a standardized literary Occitan called the koiné that was understood from the Atlantic coast to the Alps. They invented fin'amor, courtly love, and a vocabulary of longing that European poetry has never fully exhausted. Eleanor of Aquitaine carried Occitan culture to England and France. The troubadour tradition directly seeded Italian poetry, the dolce stil novo, and through it Dante. A language spoken by perhaps two million people in the twelfth century commanded the imagination of a continent.

The Albigensian Crusade of 1209 shattered this world. Pope Innocent III launched the campaign against the Cathar heresy in Languedoc, but the Capetian kings of northern France saw it as an opportunity to absorb the wealthiest, most culturally advanced region in Christendom. By 1229 the County of Toulouse had submitted; by the fourteenth century southern France was firmly under French royal authority. The troubadour tradition vanished within a generation of the crusade. Then in 1539 the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts mandated French as the sole language of royal administration, pushing Occitan entirely out of public life and into the fields and kitchens of the south.

The nineteenth century brought revival. In 1854 the poet Frédéric Mistral and six companions founded the Félibrige, a literary society dedicated to restoring Occitan's dignity and standardizing its spelling. Mistral's epic poem Mirèio (1859) stunned Europe; in 1904 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a regional language of France. Yet political recognition has always lagged behind cultural prestige. France still does not officially recognize Occitan as a language of France, and the European Charter for Regional Languages sits unratified in the French Senate. Linguists estimate fewer than half a million native speakers remain, most of them elderly — the last generation raised with it as a mother tongue before Jules Ferry's compulsory French schooling laws silenced the fields.