Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 60, Issue 1, 2025

This paper investigates the transmission of the Occitan language among new speakers within a social movement framework, emphasising the importance of language activist careers in the language policy aiming to revitalise Occitan transmission. Focusing on Calandreta immersion schools in the Occitanie region, the study analyses the trajectories of individuals who have adopted Occitan in their active linguistic repertoire, exploring how their political and professional commitments shape their engagement with the language. Through qualitative interviews, it highlights the evolving nature of language commitment, and the challenges faced by new speakers in navigating their identities within the French monolingual social context. Ultimately, the research underscores the significance of institutional support and sociopolitical activism in fostering Occitan’s linguistic and cultural vitality amidst ongoing sociolinguistic changes.

This paper presents a framework for building lemmatised Occitan corpora, focusing on early modern texts. Due to strong dialectal and diachronic variation, lemmatisation is essential for enabling cross-text and cross-period comparison. We adopt a semi-automatic approach based on the Pie neural model, combining tokenisation, super-lemma selection, and POS tagging aligned with Universal Dependencies. Initial experiments on 17th–18th century texts show promising results, particularly for frequent and grammatical words, while highlighting challenges with unknown lemmas. Despite its exploratory scope, the study demonstrates the feasibility of cost-effective corpus construction and lays the groundwork for a larger, more representative language model of Occitan.

The paper examines an Old Occitan sonnet series in chansonnier f, with particular attention to the one attributed to the troubadour Blacasset. The research focuses on the authenticity of the sonnets, the potential involvement of Jehan de Nostredame in its forgery, and the reasons why their true author found it appropriate to attribute one of them to Blacasset. The sonnets are analysed in terms of their linguistic and metrical characteristics, suggesting a possible 15th-century composition with French and Occitan influences. The historical-political context is explored as well, hinting at references to the relationships between the people of Provence and the houses of Aragon and Anjou. The paper discusses the hypotheses proposed by Paul Meyer in 1871, underlining new elements suggesting an earlier dating and questioning the real involvement of Nostredame’s apocryphal hand.

This article explores the distribution of the particle si in Old Catalan and Old Occitan. Recent work on si has connected it to the satisfaction of Medieval Romance V2 be it as an expletive or as an alternative to verb movement, always connected to topic continuity. Early Old Catalan (11th–12th centuries) presents the particle but loses it by the 13th century, when its V2 syntax weakens. From this point, sí is only found sparingly in texts of literary character. In Old Occitan, si is exclusively attested in troubadouresque prose. Its distribution suggests that it was used as a stylistic marker of this genre. This syntactic specificity supports the existence of a prestigious and influential troubadouresque koine within the prose domain, while the absence of si elsewhere in the Old Occitan written record traces an isogloss between this variety and neighbouring languages, opening questions on the fragmentation of the Gallo-Romance continuum.

This article sheds light on the current language situation in the Val d’Aran, with a focus on Aranese language acquisition, proficiency, and usage. As in many minority language settings, New Speakers bring new dynamics into the language community. The basis for this investigation was an online survey, filled out by 125 Aranese speakers, 51 of whom are New Speakers and 74 of whom are L1 Speakers.

It will be shown that New Speakers do not report acquiring a language proficiency as high as L1 Speakers, and they report using the language in fewer different contexts, but both groups indicate using the language equally in formal and informal settings. Overall, the unique situation of Aranese within the Occitan varieties can be corroborated.

This study builds on the ExpressioNarration project (2016–2018) which explores the relationship between temporality and orality in Occitan and French oral narration. After outlining the rationale for the OcOr corpus and the theoretical frameworks underpinning our analysis, the first part of this study points up the complexity of the intersection between diamesic, diatopic and diachronic factors in accounting for the distribution of alavetz, alara and alors. The second part explores usage of alavetz, alara and alors, and in particular, their metadiscursive functions, which are particularly frequent in the context of oral transmission. These metadiscursive functions include allowing the narrator to manage speech and thought presentation and to structure the narrative in sections and episodes. The multifunctionality of alavetz, alara and alors is complex: metadiscursive and semantic functions often co-exist.