Occitan language | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 03/12/2018

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Occitan language


00:03:40 1 Name
00:03:48 1.1 History of the modern term
00:05:54 1.2 Other names for Occitan
00:08:04 2 History
00:10:55 2.1 Origins
00:12:30 2.2 Occitan in the Iberian Peninsula
00:15:59 3 Geographic distribution
00:16:09 3.1 Usage in France
00:18:03 3.2 Usage outside France
00:20:01 3.3 Traditionally Occitan-speaking areas
00:22:35 3.4 Number of speakers
00:23:31 4 Dialects
00:27:07 5 Codification
00:27:16 5.1 Standardisation
00:28:29 5.2 Writing system
00:31:12 5.3 Debates concerning linguistic classification and orthography
00:35:54 6 Linguistic characterisation
00:36:43 6.1 Features of Occitan
00:36:58 6.1.1 Features of Occitan as a whole
00:38:33 6.1.2 Features of some Occitan dialects
00:40:49 6.2 Comparison with other Romance languages and English
00:41:00 6.3 Lexicon
00:42:46 6.4 Differences between Occitan and Catalan
00:48:47 6.5 Occitano-Romance linguistic group
00:50:11 7 Occitan quotes
00:54:26 8 See also
00:54:49 9 Notes
00:54:58 10 Bibliography
00:56:45 11 External links



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SUMMARY
=======
Occitan (English:  ; Occitan: [utsiˈta]; French: [ɔksitɑ̃]), also known as lenga d'òc (Occitan: [ˈleŋɡɔ ˈðɔ(k)] (listen); French: langue d'oc) by its native speakers, is a Romance language. It is spoken in southern France, Italy's Occitan Valleys, Monaco, and Spain's Val d'Aran; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. Occitan is also spoken in the linguistic enclave of Guardia Piemontese (Calabria, Italy). However, there is controversy about the unity of the language, as some think that Occitan is a macrolanguage. Others include Catalan in this family, as the distance between this language and some Occitan dialects (such as the Gascon language) is similar to the distance among different Occitan dialects. In fact, Catalan was considered an Occitan dialect until the end of the 19th century.Today, Occitan is an official language in Catalonia, where a subdialect of Gascon known as Aranese is spoken in the Val d'Aran. Occitan's closest relative is Catalan. Since September 2010, the Parliament of Catalonia has considered Aranese Occitan to be the officially preferred language for use in the Val d'Aran.
Across history, the terms Limousin (Lemosin), Languedocien (Lengadocian), Gascon, and later Provençal (Provençal, Provençau or Prouvençau) have been used as synonyms for the whole of Occitan; nowadays, "Provençal" is understood mainly as the Occitan dialect spoken in Provence, in southeast France.Unlike other Romance languages such as French or Spanish, there is no single written standard language called "Occitan", and Occitan has no official status in France, home to most of Occitania. Instead, there are competing norms for writing Occitan, some of which attempt to be pan-dialectal, whereas others are based on particular dialects. These efforts are hindered by the rapidly declining use of Occitan as a spoken language in much of southern France, as well as by the significant differences in phonology and vocabulary among different Occitan dialects.
In particular, the northern and easternmost dialects have more morphological and phonetic features in common with the Gallo-Italic and Oïl languages (e.g. nasal vowels; loss of final consonants; initial cha/ja- instead of ca/ga-; uvular ⟨r⟩; the front-rounded sound /ø/ instead of a diphthong, /w/ instead of /l/ before a consonant), whereas the southernmost dialects have more features in common with the Ibero-Romance languages (e.g. betacism; voiced fricatives between vowels in place of voiced stops; -ch- in place of -it-), and Gascon has a number of unusual features not seen in other dialects (e.g. /h/ in place of /f/; loss of /n/ between vowels; intervocalic -r- and final -t/ch in place of medieval -ll-). There are also significant lexical differences, where some dialects have words cognate with French, and others have Catalan and Spanish cognates (maison/casa "house", testa/cap "head",  ...