Provençal

Provençal emerged from the Vulgar Latin spoken in Rome's first transalpine province — Provincia, which gave Provence its name. When the Western Empire collapsed in the fifth century, Latin did not die in the south of Gaul; it evolved, sheltered by the Pyrenees and the Alps, less disrupted by Germanic migrations than the north. The speech of Provence and Languedoc preserved final vowels, softened consonants, and kept phonemes that northern Gallo-Romance discarded, producing a family of closely related dialects unified by the word for yes: oc rather than the northern oïl. This single syllable gave the entire southern tongue its alternative name, Langue d'Oc, and marked the first great divide in the history of French.

The language reached its zenith between roughly 1000 and 1200 CE, when the courts of Provence, Toulouse, and Aquitaine became the literary capitals of Western Europe. The troubadours — poet-musicians composing in Provençal — invented the secular love lyric. William IX of Aquitaine, first named troubadour, set the template in the 1090s: intricate verse forms, the suffering lover, the beloved as distant sovereign. Some 460 named troubadours survive in the manuscripts; their forms — the canso, the sirventes, the alba — spread south to Catalonia, east to the courts of Piedmont and Tuscany where Dante and Petrarch studied them, and north to Germany where they became Minnesang. For two centuries Provençal was the prestige tongue of European poetry, the language in which secular beauty was thought to be best expressed.

The catastrophe arrived not as conquest but as crusade. Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 against the Cathar heresy, and Simon de Montfort's northern armies devastated the courts that had sustained troubadour culture. Béziers was sacked in 1209 with perhaps twenty thousand dead; the subsequent Inquisition made artistic and intellectual independence dangerous. The Treaty of Paris in 1229 transferred Languedoc to the French crown. Three centuries later the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) under Francis I made French the sole language of law and administration, and Provençal was reclassified from language to patois — the speech of peasants, not princes — despite having been a written literary language for two centuries before standard French existed.

The nineteenth century brought a deliberate counteroffensive. In 1854, the poet Frédéric Mistral and six companions founded the Félibrige at a farmhouse near Avignon, dedicated to standardizing and reviving Provençal. Mistral's epic Mirèio (1859) electrified literary Europe; in 1904 he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Nobel ever awarded for a work in Occitan. But spoken transmission continued to collapse under French mass schooling and mass media. Today Provençal survives in dedicated pockets — southern France, the Occitan valleys of Piedmont, the Val d'Aran in the Pyrenees — and in the troubadour manuscripts that preserve the oldest body of secular vernacular literature in medieval Europe.