The Linguistic Status of Gascon

Few subjects give rise to as much acrimony as arguments about the language/dialect issue, particularly when the subject is an endangered language. Huge amounts of energy are expended in debates that cannot be won. To be blunt, there is no scholarly way of deciding such questions decisively. The notion of “language” that is involved in these debates is a pre-scientific one, and there are examples from around the world in which a form of speech changed its status from ‘dialect of language X’ to that of separate language (and vice versa) as a result of particular political or social events. Ultimately, the issue is one of language policy. See Chambers and Trudgill (1998).

THE SITUATION TODAY

Today, after centuries of shared history within France, Gascon is usually grouped with the other forms of the langue d’oc as a dialect of Occitan. Its distinctiveness, however, has always been clear, and many scholars (Luchaire, Bourciez, and Baldinger among them) have recommended studying it as a separate language. Bec’s (1970-71) proposal of a tripartite Occitano-Romance, consisting of Gascon, Occitan, and Catalan is a relatively satisfying solution from the linguistic point of view.

However, language maintenance efforts require a clear ideological sense of linguistic identity in order to be successful. The impetus behind the most successful language maintenance efforts in southern France in recent decades has come from the Occitanist movement, which embraces Gascon within a single Occitan language. Occitanism generated a norm based on Central Languedocian, which it long promoted as the sole standard for these regions. Resistance to this ‘referential Occitan’ in Provence and, more recently, in Gascony has led to the spread of a more flexible, polycentric notion of the language. This approach, though very late in coming to fruition, is a promising one, but it conflicts with traditional European, and particularly French, puristic attitudes that require a single form to be defined as ‘correct.’

KINDS OF ARGUMENTS

Mutual intelligibility is a frequently cited criterion for deciding language status. However, an individual’s ability to understand a different form of language is largely unpredictable: comprehension frequently is possible in one direction and not the other; some people are able to comprehend speech that others find totally opaque, etc. See Field 2009 for the relevance of this criterion for Gascon.

Arguments from history about the separate status of Gascon have also been made. Lafitte and Pépin (2009) have collected a large number of historical attestations of the different ways of referring to the languages that are of concern to us here. Their goal is to de-legitimize the notion of an “Occitan” language, but the data that they present ought to be of interest to both sides in the debate.

The linguistic consciousness of speakers is a frequently used criterion for distinguishing language from dialect. In southwestern France, twentieth-century speakers generally had only the vague and negatively loaded term ‘patois’ to refer to their speech. The exception to this rule was Bearn, where there was — and is — a real sense of béarnais as a respectable form of language. In the past twenty years, however, a notion that the patois is in some sense ‘Occitan’ has taken hold in much of the region.

As for arguments based on language structure, clear thresholds in the degree of difference that would justify the division of related dialect forms into distinct languages are impossible to establish. Chambon and Greub’s 2002 article provided serious empirical evidence for the early distinctiveness of Gascon within Gallo-Romance. In it, however, the authors are careful to point out that their conclusions derive from the particular methodology of historical linguistics. While their reasoning can be extended to support the idea of a separate modern Gascon language, if taken to its logical conclusion this approach would also suggest that Occitan is closer to French than it is to Gascon, a perspective that few would wish to defend. Thus, while we can say that Gascon cannot be subsumed under Occitan in the usual genetic sense, its modern status cannot be settled so easily: a thousand years of history within the communicative circuits of southern France have also had an impact on its form.

CONCLUSION

None of these arguments alone is sufficient to resolve the issue. Even taken in combination, they have been used to defend both the separate-language and the dialect-of-Occitan stances. The position taken on this website is that Gascon is a distinct linguistic form that deserves study in its own right. Medieval Gascon, in particular, is still poorly documented, primarily because of medievalists’ focus on the language of the troubadours. We take no position here on the political and social status of Gascon as a separate language today.

For further discussion of these matters see Field 2009.