Occitania (langue d'oc)

Southern France, which had its own language, its own literature and very nearly its own country. Occitan - the langue d'oc, named for its word for yes - was spoken across the whole south and is closer to Catalan than to French. It carried the first vernacular literature of high prestige in medieval Europe: the troubadours from the eleventh century invented the conventions of courtly love and were imitated across Italy, Iberia and Germany, and Dante seriously considered writing in it. The south was also politically distinct, with Roman law rather than customary law and counts of Toulouse who governed independently of the north. The Albigensian Crusade from 1209, launched against the Cathar heresy, destroyed that independence - Beziers was massacred, Toulouse subdued, and the county absorbed into the royal domain by 1271, with the Inquisition founded to finish the job. Occitan then declined from a literary language to a set of rural dialects, accelerated by Villers-Cotterets and the republican schools. Frederic Mistral won a Nobel prize in 1904 for writing in it. Calandreta schools now teach it. Carcassonne and Albi are World Heritage sites. Occitan has perhaps a few hundred thousand speakers across southern France, Italy's Occitan valleys and Val d'Aran in Spain, where it is official. Toulouse, Marseille, Montpellier and Bordeaux are its largest cities. The Canal du Midi is a World Heritage site. Rugby rather than football dominates the southwest. Cassoulet, aioli and pastis belong to this region, as does a large share of French wine production, from Bordeaux to the Rhone.

• Existed: 1100 CE – present
• Type: Entity