The lost tongue of Provence

Unless you happen to be at the Occitan festival in the Italian village of Sancto Lucio di Coumboscuro this week, it's extremely unlikely that you will hear Occitan spoken by more than a few elderly people. (But if you do want to know what that sounds like, listen to Radio Occitania).

There are a few places in France where you might encounter Occitan - in Toulouse, for example, which has bilingual street signs. But Britons who are familiar with the high street soap and unguent purveyor L'Occitane en Provence might assume that the language is only spoken in that region.

In fact, there are dwindling Occitan-speaking populations in Spain, Italy and Monaco and even corners of Germany and the United States. Quite how many people use Occitan on a daily basis is not clear: several hundred thousand in France, perhaps, most of them elderly. So great is the number of sub-dialects that no one has much idea how big the lexicon is: estimates vary between 250,000 and a million. But very few, if any, of them speak no other language.