Provençal French

When Roman legions marched into southern Gaul in 120 BCE and founded Narbo Martius (modern Narbonne) as their first colony beyond the Alps, they planted Latin in a landscape already layered with Celtic, Iberian, and Ligurian tongues. That Latin grew differently in the south than in the north. Cut off from the Frankish heartlands by the Massif Central and by temperament, the southern dialects shed their case endings faster, softened their consonants along Mediterranean lines, and by the ninth century had become something recognizably their own: a lingua romana rustica that scribes would eventually call the lenga d'òc — named for its word for yes, oc, as opposed to the northern French oïl.

Between 1100 and 1300, this language accomplished something no vernacular had done before: it became the first non-Latin tongue in medieval Europe to develop a sophisticated written literary tradition. The troubadours — Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, Bernart de Ventadorn, the Countess of Dia — invented courtly love poetry in Provençal and carried it across courts from Castile to Bohemia. Dante Alighieri, who wrote in Tuscan Italian, called the Provençal poets his masters and placed Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio as the greatest love poet he had ever read. For two centuries, if you wrote love poetry anywhere in Europe, you wrote it in Provençal or in conscious imitation of it.

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), launched by Pope Innocent III against the Cathar heresy concentrated in Languedoc, destroyed this civilization within a generation. Northern French armies sacked Béziers, massacred populations, and absorbed southern territories into the French crown's orbit. The Treaty of Paris (1229) and the Inquisition that followed broke the back of southern political autonomy, and by the 14th century Provençal was retreating from courts and law courts alike into domestic and agricultural speech. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), requiring all royal legal documents to be written in French, formalized what military conquest had begun: the slow burial of a civilization.

The language refused to disappear entirely. In 1854, seven young Provençal poets — including Frédéric Mistral — founded the Félibrige in a castle near Avignon, a literary movement to restore Occitan to written dignity. Mistral's epic poem Mirèio (1859) and his monumental dictionary Lou Trésor dóu Félibrige earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904, the only writer ever honored for work in a minority Romance language. Today Provençal survives in several regional dialects — Lengadocian, Gascon, Limousin, Auvergnat, Vivaro-Alpine, and Provençal proper — spoken mainly by elderly rural communities and a small urban revival. France recognized Occitan as a regional language in 2008, and Calandreta bilingual schools operate across the south, but the language that taught Europe to sing of love is fading — carried now more in dictionaries and festival songs than in the conversations of daily life.