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My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice. Th
by bambax 8y ago
My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice.
That said, 1/ Occitan is a lot like Spanish (unlike, say, Breton or Basque which are very far from Latin (or French)) and 2/ most people were bilingual speakers of French + regional language at least as early as the middle of the 19th century. It is true that France fought aggressively to suppress local languages, but almost everyone understood French anyway.
- FeteCommuniste 8y agoOccitan is closer to Catalan than to Spanish.
- kgwgk 8y agoBoth are a lot like Spanish (unlike Breton or Basque).
- nickserv 8y agoBreton and Basque are not Romance languages. Occitan and Catalan are more similar to each other than Catalan to Castillian or Occitan to French.
- kgwgk 8y agoI think we all agree about that. Edit: bambax said “Occitan is a lot like Spanish (unlike, say, Breton or Basque [...])”. He could have said “is a lot like Catalan”, or “is a lot like French”, or “is a lot like Gascon”. All are true to different degrees.
- mprev 8y agoTo add to that, Basque is not even Indo-European, let alone Latinate. And Breton is a Brythonic Celtic language (as opposed to the Goidelic branch, home to Gaelic) similar to Welsh and Cornish.