Occitania is named after the way its people once said yes
The name Occitania glues together òc, the Occitan word for yes, and Aquitania, the Roman label for much of the region. It covers a sweep of southern France plus slivers of Spain, Italy and Monaco, yet only somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 of its 16 million people speak the language natively or fluently.
Dante, writing in the late 13th century, sorted Romance tongues by their word for yes: lingua d'òc for the south of France, set against Italian si and the oïl of northern French. Around the same period the Capetian administration, having taken lands south of the Loire, coined the Latin Occitania in its paperwork, and after annexation the word came to mean Languedoc specifically. The French form Occitanie is first recorded in 1556, the Italian in 1549 and the German in 1572. A Paris compilation of 1818, La Minerve Française, floated a rival story that tied the word to Occident, meaning simply western lands.
The cultural split is old. When Diocletian and Constantine carved Gaul into dioceses, the Diocese of Vienne ran up to the Loire, the first hint of the later divide between the oc and oïl languages. In 781 Charlemagne made his son Louis the Pious king of Aquitaine, and in 806 added the Spanish March, Septimania and Provence to his share. Troubadours of the High Middle Ages chose Occitan for poems of courtly love and, sometimes, of religious and social tolerance. In February 1573 Huguenots and moderate Catholics even formed a federation, the United Provinces of the South, giving each province wide autonomy.
The name was revived in the mid-19th century, partly because the medieval Duchy of Aquitaine did not match the modern region of that name. Frédéric Mistral popularised Pays d'Oc, the Felibritge movement adopted a seven-pointed star for seven provinces including one Catalan, and the College of Occitania was set up by Estieu and Salvat in 1927. A 1976 survey found that 95% of respondents defined being Occitan through language, 94% through culture and only 20% through nationhood.
Measured by where the language survives, Occitania spans about 190,000 km2 and held about fifteen million people in 1999. Occitan has been official in Spain's Aran Valley since 1990 and across Catalonia since 2006. Since 28 September 2016 France has also had an administrative region called Occitanie, merging Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon, though it covers only part of the historic area and includes Catalan-speaking Roussillon.
Source: Occitania
