Occitan (or langue d’oc) is a Romance language which blossomed in the Midi of France (except in Roussillon, where Catalan is spoken, and the French Basque Country), Val d’Aran (Spain) and the Occitan Valleys (Italy). It is divided into seven branches: Auvergant, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin, Provençal, Vivaro-Alpin. Its nomenclature shifted throughout the centuries, designating, as it did, fluctuating linguistic realities. From the 17th until the late 18th century, the terms “patois” or “Gascon” were interchangeably used to name the entire Occitan linguistic domain. While the term “patois” was, and continued to be, used as a generic term for Occitan – regardless of its dialectal multiplicity – and all non-standard French and regional languages, other, less slapdash names arose in the 19th century: “Provençal”, “langue provençale”, “langue d’oc”, “Gascon” reappeared in the works of Romanists, medievalists, antiquarians and textual scholars. But the growing predominance of the term “Provençal” to refer to the entire Occitan continuum provoked deep fractures within the Occitan cultural and linguistic revival, since it implied a devaluation of Occitan variants outside Provence. “Provençal”, in effect, refers both to a very small and geographically/historically demarcated portion of the Occitan domain, and to a literary koine beyond the limits of “Occitania”; and it feeds into the conflation between Provençal as the language of the troubadours (of which Mistral monopolized the inheritance), and Provençal as the Occitan variety spoken in Provence.

In addition, the distinction from Catalan was fluid prior to 1850, and Catalan authors often called their idiom “Limousin”. In the 19th century, interest in Occitan was expressed in philological studies, grammars and primers, and literature.

Romance scholars in France turned to Occitan in an early-19th-century interest in the recovery and preservation of national traditions. Their attention did not focus on the spoken language, but on written works and linguistic “monuments”. These early “Romanists” contributed with their works to restoring prestige to the language of the troubadours. Their comparative-historical interest in language development was a break from earlier linguistic practice and proved formative for the next century.

Earlier interest in troubadour poetry had focused on literary (rather than linguistic or text-historical) aspects. A more philological and language-historical approach was developed by this new generation of scholars. Besides the preparatory work done by Henri-Pascal de Rochegude in his glossary of 1819, François-Just-Marie Raynouard (1761–1836) is generally considered the initiator of Romance philology, ahead of the German Friedrich Christian Diez, an adept of Jacob Grimm, who would fix philological procedures and standards. On the basis of his researches on the origins of the troubadours’ language, Raynouard advanced the theory of a single Romance language (which he identified with Provençal) from which the various languages of the south of Europe (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) had subsequently branched off. Raynouard’s theory was rejected by August Wilhelm Schlegel who, in his Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales (1818), argued that the different Romance languages had arisen separately from Latin. Although the theory of the seniority of Provençal over other Romance languages lost credit, Raynouard’s linguistic approach to the poetic corpus of troubadour poetry proved ground-breaking.

Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s La langue d’oc rétablie (1820) aimed to restore the Occitan language in its written dignity, and to prove that the French language owed “all its rudiments” to Occitan. Animated by a visceral love for his native language and land, Fabre d’Olivet was the first person to attempt to demonstrate the continuity between ancient and modern Occitan, thus establishing the historical identity of the Occitan language. That interest found continuation in the Société pour l’étude des Langues Romanes (SLR), founded in Montpellier in 1869 with the purpose of continuing studies on Romance languages, especially Occitan. The Revue des langues romanes, first published in 1870, was the first French periodical devoted to Romance philological and linguistic studies, in particular to the ancient and modern langue d’oc.

During the 19th century, the increasing production of grammar books, textbooks and dictionaries manifested the belief that the vernacular was by now too weak to survive through oral expression alone and therefore headed for extinction. Dictionaries were partly intended as repositories to preserve the failing language and partly as a tool to ease its coexistence with a growing presence of French. The practical, trade-oriented purpose of earlier, 18th-century dictionaries shifted to the prescriptive suppression of dialect locutions and expressions. The aim of such publications was not to eradicate Occitan, but rather to master French and thus correct the misuse of both languages; witness Chabaud’s Grammaire française expliquée au moyen de la langue provençale ou nouvelle méthode avec laquelle un provençal qui sait lire peut sans crainte apprendre en peu de temps à parler et à écrire correctement le français (1826); Reynier’s Correction raisonnée des fautes de langage et de prononciation qui se commettent même au sein de la bonne société dans la Provence et quelques autres provinces du Midi (1829); or Charles de Gabrielli’s Manuel du provençal ou les provençalismes corrigés à l’usage des habitants des départements des Bouches-du-Rhône, du Var, des Basses-Alpes, du Vaucluse et du Gard (1836). Other dictionaries, compiled from the literature of the troubadours, intended to promote language learning and to establish a relationship between French and the vernaculars. This was the case, for example, with Étienne Garcin’s Nouveau Dictionnaire provençal-français contenant généralement tous les termes des différents régions de la Provence, les plus difficiles à rendre en français, tels que ceux des plantes, des oiseaux, de marine, d’agriculture, des arts mécaniques, des locutions populaires, etc., précédé d’un abrégé de grammaire provençale-française et suivi de la collection la plus complète des proverbes provençaux (Marseille 1823). Joseph-Toussaint Avril’s Dictionnaire provençal-français, suivi d’un vocabulaire français-provençal (Apt 1839) was intended as an “initiation into the language of the troubadours”; Avril wanted to serve the rural economy and those educated professions that had common dealings with country people: doctors, priests, judges, tradesmen. Simon-Jude Honnorat’s Dictionnaire provençal-français ou Dictionnaire de la langue d’oc ancienne et moderne (1848) sought to bring order to a language that had “no syntax, no orthography, no firmly fixed terms” by offering an encyclopedic compendium of all the words of the Occitan language, their equivalents in all the Neo-Latin languages, roots and compounds.

By the mid-19th century, a lively literary movement nurtured a growing interest in the Occitan language and literature. In 1854, the literary association Félibrige was created in Provence by seven young poets who decided to write in Provençal and called themselves félibres. Through their writings, the félibres aspired to restore the prestige of, and a living interest in, the language, thus saving it from obliteration by the advance of French. Between 1878 and 1886, Frédéric Mistral completed the landmark two-volume Trésor du Félibrige, a huge compilation work embracing all the ancient and modern Occitan dialects and aiming to fix the language of the movement and to replace Honnorat’s dictionary. Its full title specified its scope, which included

• all the words used in the Midi of France, with their French meaning, both in their literal and in their figurative sense, the augmentatives and diminutives, and a large number of examples and quotations from authors;
• archaic and dialectal varieties next to each word, with the similar of the different Romance languages;
• roots, vulgar-Latin forms and etymologies;
• synonyms of all the words in their various senses;
• a comparative table of auxiliary verbs in the main dialects;
• paradigms of many regular verbs, conjugations of irregular verbs, and grammatical uses of each word;
• technical terms of agriculture, marine and all arts and crafts;
• popular terms in natural history, with their scientific translations;
• geographical names of cities, villages, districts, rivers and mountains of the Midi, with their various ancient and modern forms;
• the denominations and particular sobriquets of the inhabitants of every locality;
• the historical proper names and surnames of the Midi;
• a complete collection of proverbs, popular sayings, riddles, idiomatic expressions, phrases and popular turns of phrase;
• explanations of the manners and customs, institutions, traditions and beliefs of the southern provinces;
• biographical, bibliographical and historical notes about the main celebrities, books or events from the Midi.

Mistral’s dictionary, and also his considerable literary success, gave a solid codification to Provençal/Occitan.