Occitan: Reviving a Dying Language through Music

Choosing to sing in a dying language might not be the savviest commercial move, but the members of La Cor de la Plana, an outstanding six-man vocal ensemble from Marseilles, the second largest city in France, have their reasons. Occitan, the language in which La Cor de la Plana sings, is spoken by only a few million people throughout the world, but if the group achieves its goal of reviving Occitan language and culture, that number will surely grow.

Occitan is a Romance language native to the south of France (a region that encompasses such important cities as Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice), Monaco and small parts of Italy and Spain. It was the common spoken language of rural people in the south of France until early in the 20th century, but it is today a dying tongue. It’s difficult to enumerate precisely, as some Occitan speakers are defensive about it and don’t admit to knowing the language, but it’s estimated that there are fewer than 500,000 speakers of Occitan left in France. (There is also, oddly enough, a pocket of Occitan speakers in Valdese, North Carolina.) As is the case with most dying languages, the majority of Occitan speakers are elderly, with almost no one learning the language to replace those who die.

Reasons for Occitan’s precipitous decline abound. Though it was the language of European poets and troubadours in the 12th and 13th century (Dante considered writing The Divine Comedy in Occitan so his work could be read by more people), the French government has since the mid-1500s discouraged the use of Occitan in favor of French. The biggest decline in Occitan speakers came during and right after the French Revolution (1789-1799), when speaking regional dialects or languages was seen (and severely punished) as a threat to the Republic. The nail in the coffin came during the First World War, when Occitan-speaking soldiers from the south of France had to speak French to be understood by their comrades.

The revival of Occitan culture and language is closely tied to a political movement in the south of France that blends Marxist theory, rejection of what might be called domestic colonialism (the suppression of a region by the central government), ethnic pride, anarchy and a sense of the absurd. Musicians from Marseilles, particularly hip-hop musicians, are in the forefront of this movement; the hip-hop ensemble Massilia Sound System helped launch the Occitan cultural revival in the 1980s.

Formed in 2001, La Cor de la Plana (the name means The Heart of La Plaine, the bohemian section of Marseilles) consists of Denis Sampieri, Sebastien Spessa, Benjamin Novarino-Giana, Rodin Kaufmann, Manu Bathelemy and Manu Theron, the group’s founder, leader and spokesman. Accompanied only by hand drums—the bendir, a North African frame drum similar to an Irish bodhrán, and the tambourine-like tamburello and pandeiro—and “picaments” (foot stomping) and “bataments” (hand clapping), the group whips up a swirling torrent of “dance songs that take you away into a smiling trance” (Le Monde).

Learn more about the alphabet and pronunication on the Easy Occitan website. Hear this beautiful language when Lo Cor de la Plana performs in Dayton on March 31.