About Old Occitan

Old Occitan, formerly referred to as Old Provençal after one of its major dialects, is the ancestor of the endangered language spoken today in southern France by an undetermined number of bilingual individuals. This language constitutes an important element of the literary, linguistic, and cultural heritage of the Romance languages; it was known throughout the western medieval world through the lyric poetry of the Troubadours. While the historical importance of this language is indisputable, Occitan, as a language, remains linguistically understudied. In the past decade, a number of annotated corpora have been developed for other Medieval Romance languages, for example, Old Spanish (Davies 2002), Old Portuguese (Davies 2006), and Old French (Martineau 2010, Stein 2008}. However, annotated data for Old Occitan are still sparse. There exist (to our knowledge) two electronic databases, "The Concordance of Medieval Occitan'' (Ricketts 2005) and "Provençal poetry", but users of those corpora are limited to lexical search.