religious works. Admixtures of Occitan occur in 1 1th-century Latin documents, and the
first non-literary document entirely in Occitan, an act of donation, dates from 1102,
followed by sixteen other documents before ca. 1120. Though French has earlier texts,
Occitan has more documents from before 1200 than any other Romance language,
probably because of active municipal life and commercial exchanges. The first known
troubadour, Guilhem IX, must have begun to produce his verses shortly before 1100,
since he was born in 1071, but the surviving manuscripts of troubadour poetry date only
from the 13th century on. The Early Occitan period is generally considered to extend
from ca. 800 to 1000, Old Occitan from 1000 to 1350, and Middle Occitan from 1350 to
1550.
In the Middle Ages, Provincia gave its name to Provence, which eventually became
the southeastern province of the French kingdom, roughly bordered by the Alps, the
Mediterranean, and the Rhône and Durance rivers. The corresponding adjective,
provincialis, or “Provençal” in its modern French form, became used ca. 1280 for the
language of southern France. However, it was not the first such term for that language.
Lengua romana or roma(n), meaning roughly “vernacular language,” was used much
earlier, and lemosi(n), derived from the province of Limoges, came in ca. 1200, while
lenga d’oc, derived from the distinctive affirmative particle oc, came into use ca. 1290.
The term “Provençal” (which American scholars tend to pronounce as in
French, though some prefer the anglicized version /pr vénts l/) began to predominate in
the 16th century and was given further impetus by the late 19th-century literary revival
centered in Provence known as the felibrige movement and by the translations and essays
through which Ezra Pound made the troubadours into an important influence on 20th-
century poetry. Today, however, most scholars consider that “Provençal” should be
reserved for the dialect of the southeast, and that “Occitan” (attested from ca. 1300 under
the form occitanus) is the most appropriate overall term for this language, whose identity
history has cast into confusion by denying it a national state.
From the preliterary period until ca. 1200, Occitan was the chief language of everyday
communication in Occitan territory. Latin was known to all educated persons and was
spoken, at least on formal occasions, by clerics and intellectuals, but as a written
language it was increasingly displaced by the vernacular. In the 12th century, French
remained a foreign tongue, compared by at least one troubadour to the barking of dogs.
But beginning with the French penetration of Occitania under the guise of the
Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century, the Occitan language has been in almost
constant recession. Although Occitan persevered as the standard administrative and
judicial language into the 15th century, the prestige of the conquering French culture and
the centralizing linguistic tendencies of the Renaissance monarchy and of all subsequent
French regimes have fragmented Occitan into a scattering of oral “patois.” Almost all of
the several million speakers of its various dialects are now bilingual in French, and most
inhabitants of Occitania know nothing of the Occitan language. Occitan speakers today
fall into two chief groups: inhabitants of remote villages and mountainous areas, and a
small number of intellectuals largely connected to Languedocian universities. In the
1980s, Occitan entered the “program” of the French baccalauréat and is now studied in
certain universities as both a living and a medieval language. Literary expression
continues to be torn between the Provençal dialect in the late 19th-century tradition
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