Catalan and Occitan: one diasystem, two languages

The major dialect divisions of Occitan

Thanks to the similarities in their evolution, Occitan and Catalan are two very closely related languages; so much so that early Romance-language scholars considered them to be one language, bundling them together under the single, rather inadequate name of Provençal. We can better understand the origins of these similarities if we bear in mind that, in three quarters of its territory, Catalan is a language of colonisation imposed on areas of autochthonous Arabic and Mozarabic speakers. The original area where the language emerged from the local Latin, so-called Old Catalonia, is about the same size as each of the major dialect regions of Occitan; a geolinguistic area which would fit naturally into this panorama. In terms of their linguistic characteristics and history, we could say that Catalan and the major Occitan dialects form a diasystem within the family of Romance language varieties, a diasystem that Bec calls ‘Occitano-Romance’ (1995: 6).

On the one hand we have medieval witnesses that conflate Catalan speakers and Occitan speakers into one —remember that Dante locates the langue d’oc in Hispania—; on the other we have Catalans who distinguish between the two languages from the earliest texts: Ramon Llull had his works translated into Occitan so that they could be read further north (Badia, Santanach & Soler 2009, 2016). Indeed, the fact that the Catalans used medieval Occitan for poetry and Catalan for prose texts is clear proof of a patent distinction between the two. We can therefore speak of two discrete literary and cultural traditions which became established as such, albeit within a historical context of increasing political differences. If we think of languages as elements that create distinct spaces of communication, we see that Catalan and Occitan are, from the outset, the foundations of two different spaces. This does not stop us from recognising the utility of a close relationship between them, however, for example in the effective promotion of both languages. It is not unreasonable to assume that if Occitan were as widely used as Catalan, the speakers of both languages would be able to communicate with each other spontaneously in their own language; in fact, this is what happens nowadays in encounters between Occitan and Catalan speakers.

Main phonetic developments of Catalan and Occitan dialects

This table only presents those developments which we can consider historical and which characterise the main Occitan dialects, without giving either the pronunciation of the forms contained therein or very local differences (see Ronjat 1941, Bec 1995). Some letters included in common spellings are given in brackets to indicate that they are mute due to a particular dialectal change: pan [ˈpaŋ] ~ pa(n) [ˈpa]. As we can see, the results of these developments often divide the geographical areas of the various dialects, and this is indicated by a forward slash. Hyphens are used to indicate that the evolution of a word coincides with that given in the previous column, without taking into account accents, adapted to common usage in writing for each dialect.

Xavier Lamuela²