Occitan and Catalan: the language border nobody can quite place

Occitan and Catalan: the border nobody can quite place

There is a theory doing the rounds that makes more than a few people uncomfortable: Occitan is what happens when a Frenchman starts speaking Catalan, and Catalan is what happens when a Spaniard starts speaking Occitan. The paradox, coined in the heat of a debate about minority languages, sums up an old problem: two sibling Romance languages, mutually intelligible to varying degrees, with administrative borders that never matched the linguistic ones. And an underlying question that still has no comfortable answer: what turns a dialect into a language?

The playing field is the strip running from the Aran Valley to Provence. There, Occitan — or the langue d'oc — is spoken, was spoken and is spoken badly, while Catalan acts as a bridge towards the Mediterranean. The discussion soon drifted towards medieval history and money, which is where everything tends to end up.

How healthy is Occitan today?

The most awkward question is that of its real vitality. In theory, Occitan extends across half of southern France; in practice, contemporary references are scarce and its spread looks suspiciously like that of Aragonese or Asturian (bable). A language with a Nobel Prize — Frédéric Mistral, 1904 — and a speaker base that would not fill a stadium.

That contrast between historical prestige and everyday use is the heart of the matter. Occitan was the language of troubadours, of administration and of literature; today it survives in bilingual signage, in optional school classes and in the pride of those who champion it. The comparison with Catalan is no idle one: Catalan has millions of speakers, media outlets, universities and a regional state behind it. Occitan has six dialects and a Jacobin France that never gave it quarter.

The money test: can you buy a language?

The most repeated suspicion is that the difference between dialect and language is budgetary. With funding, standardisation and its own education system, a dialect becomes an official language; without them, it remains folklore. The Aran Valley, with its Aranese — a variety of Gascon Occitan — recognised as co-official in Catalonia, is the laboratory experiment: a small community with legal status and resources.

The irony is that Aranese owes its protection to Catalan, not to French. And there another sustancia ilegal opens up: the eastern strip of Aragon, where Catalan is spoken, and Roussillon, where Catalan coexists with French. Each administration decides what to protect and what to let die.

Muret, 1213: the battle that changed everything

Some maintain, half in jest half in earnest, that if Aragon had won at Muret the map of Europe would be a different one: half of France divided between the English and the Burgundians, and everyone happier. The battle, in which Peter II of Aragon died facing the crusaders of Simon de Montfort, sealed the fate of Occitania and its absorption by the French crown.

The historical joke hides a truth: the linguistic border was not drawn by speakers, it was drawn by armies. And what we today call Occitan and Catalan are two branches of a single trunk that politics split apart eight centuries ago.

The Old Catalan that may have been Occitan

The sharpest provocation of the whole affair: much of what is studied as Old Catalan is, strictly speaking, Occitan. There is no medieval writer who claims to be writing in Catalan, because the notion of Catalan as a distinct literary language came later. The Catalan troubadours wrote in Provençal, the poetic koiné of the age.

That does not delegitimise modern Catalan, but it does relativise the narrative of continuity. Languages are historical entities, not essences. And the border between two neighbouring Romance languages is always a gradient, not a line.

In the end, the question left hanging is the usual one: how much of what we call linguistic identity is history, and how much is budget?