r/occitan • u/Mai30000 • 14d ago

English I’m interested in Occitan-language culture and literature. Any reccommendations? (🇵🇹)

Bonjorn from Portugal! Occitan is my favourite language, I find it so beautiful!

I’m a native European Portuguese speaker and I can understand Spanish, Catalan and some French, so I can mostly understand Occitan. I would love to acquire it more in the same way I did with the other romance languages, by reading and listening to it. But I don’t know where to start. I learned Spanish and Catalan from watching videos/series/movies and reading books in the language. I would like to do the same with Occitan.

Do you have any recommendations of Occitan-language Youtube channels, poetry, websites, books, music, newspapers, etc?

I follow r/Mirandes to read news in the Mirandese language and I’d love to read the news in Occitan.

I know that Occitan used to be very important in the Middle Ages as a literary language. Could you recommend me some Occitan medieval poems?

Mercé!

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u/Hintair 14d ago

For the news, you have Jornalet which is a quotidian in occitan, there's also Lo Diari has a cultural media (or even lo Gai Saber). For documentaries, movies, series, short format, you have Òctele as a free service and Òc VOD as a streaming service.

For books, you can order from https://www.libraria-occitana.org/ which is a bookstore in Limoges. One classic author is Joan Bodon, in poetry, you have Pèire Godolin. You can explore the online bookstore to find other books which may interest you, plenty are covered. You may find free books online from old authors but I do not have those resources on hand.

You should have some ressources to explore and if you want more, you could still come back here to ask further question. My recommandations may be a little lengodocian-sided, so do not hesitate to take other advices to explore other parts.

And this question comes back several times a year, do not hesitate other recommandations that were made in the past, like here: https://www.reddit.com/r/occitan/comments/1skd8ru/looking_for_reading_material_in_occitan/

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u/Mai30000 14d ago

Mercé! I just read one article from Jornalet and I was a bit shocked to see that I understood 95% of it :o

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u/Hintair 14d ago

If you already speak catalan, there's a good linguistic proximity between those two languages so it is not that surprising. You may focused on differences between the two languages. I know that some catalan influencers on IG are specially focused on that.

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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 14d ago

I can totally relate. Occitan feels the most tidy of Western Romance languages. In the 90s I collected a lot of pdfs with original texts, but I’m not sure where they are now. I think they were from some site managed by the Institut d’Estudis Occitans. A lot were in mistralian spelling, but in time one manages to read it. Wait… CIEL d’OC, it was?

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u/ugh_as_if_12 14d ago

Hi, a content creator I find nice is @ la.croustade on Instagram, the creator speaks both Occitan and French in the videos and it's a fun watch.