UniLang

Woods wrote:How do they compare? Should they be considered separate languages and written differently or standardised into one thing? What do you think of France's decision to veto recognition of Catalan as an official language of the EU?

It's a different language, not a dialect, not a variety: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occit%C3%A0

France is France, both Spain and France want Catalan and any other minority languages dead (I mean the States, not the people!).

These are the questions I'm asking myself before having read much about it. But I'm thinking of learning some Occitan as an alternative to French. However, I may end up not being able to speak it with anyone but people from Catalonia?

We Catalans don't understand Occitan (I don't know anyone who does. Actually, I never understand anything when I watch the news in Occitan). If you learn the language you'll only be able to speak it with other Occitan speakers, not Catalan/Balearic/Valencian speaker

I'm thinking that it's worth making the effort to revive languages that spread over huge areas like that and unifying their speakers into making one standard that can make its way by virtue of size and number of speakers, in spite of the aggressive destructive efforts of governments.

It has 700,000 speakers, I don't think that's "huge", as you say

And if there's someone from France in that forum, how common is it to find young people speaking Occitan between themselves rather than standard French?

Núria Harket wrote:We Catalans don't understand Occitan (I don't know anyone who does. Actually, I never understand anything when I watch the news in Occitan). If you learn the language you'll only be able to speak it with other Occitan speakers, not Catalan/Balearic/Valencian speaker

Saim wrote:
Really? I've always thought that at least Aranese and Languedocian are fairly mutually intelligible with Catalan, whereas the other dialects are not. Which news report have you been watching?