Did you know France has two languages? Proper French and a separate Occitan language or lenga d’òc. Occitan is the language of the south. It had its relative zienth in the 14th century but still has several million speakers today. However, there is a huge delcine in native speakers, only about a half a million natives mostly being elderly. You will rarely hear this language on the streets but the entire region of southern France speaks Occitan. Provençal is sometimes what English speakers call Provençal. The word òc was/is their word for ‘yes’ as opposed to ‘oui’.
French truly became a unified country during the first world war aruges Eugene Weber in ‘Peasants into Frenchmen’ as there were so many reagional dialects and varried customs and provinces, with Occiatan being the classic example, that during the war all the French found themselves togeter for the first time. There were even cases where French soldiers from varrious regions like Occitanian land were wrongly accuseted of being foreign spies.
The French who speak Occitan and the French who speak French can kind of understand each other, but it is a very different language.
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