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Academy of Occitan Language gets up and running

Viella, the capital of the Aran Valley, is as of Friday home to the headquarters of the main organization for the Occitan language · The second stage of the plan to normalize the language of Occitania is under way.

The Academy of Occitan Language has finally become a reality. The Aran Valley (Era Val d’Aran, in Aranese, an Occitan dialect), the only place where Occitan has official status, is as of Friday home to the organization that over the coming years will implement the second stage of the plan to normalize the language, which aims to obtain political recognition for Occitan across the Occitan-speaking area, from the Pyrenees to the valleys of the Piedmont in Italy.

According to the Avui newspaper, the Academy will take over from the Occitan Language Council, which established norms for the spoken and written language between 1996 and 2007. It is now time to address issues such as grammar, neologisms and the creation of reference works such as dictionaries and style guides.

In addition to linguistic matters, however, the Academy will also have a political role: it will have to convince both the institutions and the citizens of the area in which Occitan is traditionally spoken that there is a real need to protect and promote the language. Occitan is currently only official in the Principality of Catalonia due to the fact that Aranese, a dialect of Occitan, is spoken in the Aran Valley. The language has legal recognition in Italy, but in France it only enjoys generic protection. According to Linguamón Occitan is spoken by between one and approximately four million people.

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