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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

A piece of interesting trivia about the Languedoc region: its name literally means the place where people prononce "yes" as "oc" (well, "the 'oc' language"). It's as if Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas" were in a region named "the drawl zone"

Actually Occitan is now a dead language, and at the time it was current, nobody pronounced "yes" as "oui" yet either. But the name persists.

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Occitan dialects still exist and are spoken. Some even argue that Catalan (in Spain) could be considered one these dialects, is mutually comprensible with some Occitan dialects, and it has quite a few speakers (4 million according to WP)

> Occitan is now a dead language

What?? This is completely false. There are hundreds of thousands of native Occitan speakers alive today.

LOL, no. Most of the few native speakers I knew are dead. The rest is people who learn a made-up language in school as a foreign language.

The many Occitan schools in my region are proving you wrong.

Existence of language schools doesn't prove existence of native speakers.

The existence of native speakers proves the existence of native speakers?

This isn't fake news, it's well documented -- every recent study on Occitan has estimated at least 100,000 native speakers, on the very low end.

Yes, it's a very endangered language, and it might be dead in a few decades, but it's not dead yet.

BTW, this only applies to France. In Val d'Aran for example (in Spain) it is an everyday language that doesn't seem at any risk of disappearing.

How is who you know relevant?

I don't know any Hungarian speakers; can we conclude that Hungarian is a dead language?

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