Marching for Occitan
Around 20,000 people took part in marches in Carcassonne at the weekend to promote Occitan, the language of the Languedoc and further afield.
Previous marches had 10,000 demonstrators in Carcassonne in 2005, and 20,000 in Béziers in 2007. Some Irish-language supporters may have a sense of déjà vu from what we experienced in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.
The flag of the Languedoc and Occitan on a boat in our back yard (the Canal du Midi)
Occitan’s medieval ancestor, Provençal or Langue d’Oc, was the first literary dialect of high culture in what we now call France. It developed, like the precursor of modern French, from “Vulgar Latin” – spread by Roman soldiers and traders to the local populations. It was the language of the medieval troubadours and reached its height around the 14th century.
The latest demonstrations show that Occitan is firmly back on the political agenda, or ought to be. People came from 30 departments across the south of France, and from areas of Italy and Spain where Occitan is still spoken. The demo was organised by the group Anem Òc! Per la lenga occitana.
While the importance of regional languages was written into the French constitution last year, the Occitan language movement says little has been done in practice. It wants Occitan schools, and Occitan TV and radio stations.
Occitan and Irish
It’s always hard to put figures on minority languages at the best of times, but Wikipedia reckons Occitan is spoken as a first language by around 1.5 million people in France, Italy, Spain and Monaco – and up to seven million people in France understand the language.
In Ireland with its much smaller overall population, the Irish language is estimated to be the “main community and household language” of 3% of the Republic’s population, with around 40,000 up to 80,000 fully native speakers.
Census figures suggest that about one in three people (1.8 million) on the island of Ireland north and south can understand some Irish.
TV and schools
The Occitan language movement’s emphasis on broadcasting and education is spot on. Music and literature are very important too. This is where you create a next generation, and bring the language into the mainstream media soup.
In Ireland the Irish language was in the doldrums up to the 1990s, but now we have a low-budget but quite adventurous little Irish-language TV station called TG4 since 1998.
Its “trojan horses” were the dubbed children’s programmes (SpongeBob Square Pants and Sesame Street in Irish), some very distinctive food and travel documentaries, and home-produced soaps and political dramas, alongside cheap westerns and world cinema.
Despite (or maybe even because of) a shoestring budget, TG4 is now the station you zap over to as a real alternative to the other “mainstream” stations in Ireland.
We also have several Irish-language radio stations, a few Irish newspapers and, last but certainly not least, a thriving Irish-language schools movement – the Gaelscoileanna.
As the maverick economic commentator David McWilliams wrote in the Sunday Business Post in 2005, while Ireland was still officially in the Celtic Tiger boom:
“Forget the blarney about the educated workforce – we (the Irish) are no better educated than the Belgians, French or Germans – but we are English-speaking, and that was the clincher for many American multinational companies which wanted to send their unadventurous middle managers to countries where they could order a beer after work…
“(Yet) the connection between economic success and English in recent years has also led to something rather counter-intuitive for the fortunes of Irish. Gael-Linn, Gaelscoileanna and language courses have never been in such demand. Irish people are now exploring Irish as never before.
“When I was a teenager, for many of us suburban kids, Irish was associated with economic backwardness. When you are poor you don’t have time to concern yourself with culture, but now that the economy has benefited enormously from English, we are re-examining the Irish language, and the prospects for the Irish haven’t looked this good for over 100 years.”
He goes on to explain in his book “The Pope’s Children” how the demand for Gaelscoileanna extended from the “traditional” group of Irish language enthusiasts into the heart of middle-class Ireland.
It all coincided with Riverdance in 1994, the IRA ceasefire and TG4’s young and sexy programming. Suddenly Irish was hip among the middle classes.
“For many of the sophisticated elite, who are acutely aware of what their peers are doing, there was something different going on in the Gaelscoileanna.
“The fact that the Irish-speaking secondary schools, which are free, send more pupils to university than many fee-paying schools, indicates that there is something going on in Gaelscoileanna that money just cannot buy.
“That something is participation. Parents in Gaelscoileanna get involved; they tend to be agitators rather than passive spectators. They are consulted, they are responsible, they feel ownership.”
In other words, a language and cultural revival, fuelled by a combination of class mobility and a bit more local democracy.
Meanwhile you can read the reports on last weekend’s Occitan demonstrations in Libération (Toulouse edition) and Midi Libre (Carcassonne edition).
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Fair enough but there’s a big difference between being a regional language in a large country and an ” official” language in a small country??