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Glossary
Appears in
Published 2012
As I mentioned in the introduction, we know that the name Languedoc means ‘the language that says oc’ (‘yes’ in Occitan) as opposed to the northern ‘language that says oyi or oui’ or Languedoïl.
Officially, Occitan, which is not a form of French at all, and has a lot in common with Latin, was the language spoken by all those who live south of the line running from the Gironde in the west, eastwards through Limoges to Vichy and beyond. But when you look closer, you find, as did Abbé Henri Grégoire in 1764, that the language of Occitan turns out to be ‘a muddle of incomprehensible dialects’.