SPEAKERS of Occitan have begun a campaign to preserve what many Europeans regard as an obscure dialect but which its defenders maintain is spoken as a first language by two million people.

Two hundred delegates are attending a week-long Occitan Festival at the village of Sancto Lucio di Coumboscuro, near Cuneo, on Italy’s border with France. The langue d’oc — from its word for “yes” — is a Romance language spoken in the Languedoc region of the south of France but also in parts of Italy, Spain and in Monaco.

Sergio Arneodo, an Occitan-speaking poet and the moving force behind the festival, said that people had travelled from Arles, Nantes, Durance and Queyras in France, the Val d’Aran in Catalonia and Piedmont in northern Italy. He said that annual Occitan gatherings had been held before, but it was time to save and promote the language and traditions of an “invisible nation”.

“Occitan was the language of the medieval troubadors,” he said. “We are divided by mountains but united by a noble language.”

At the gathering Occitan speakers dance and sing to harmonicas, flutes and violins, wearing folk costumes and waving red-and-yellow flags, the colours of Provence and Catalonia. Many Occitan speakers refer to themselves as Provençal. Evenings are devoted to feasts of polenta washed down with mulled wine.

Organisers said that many had travelled to the festival on foot over ancient mountain tracks. Signor Arneodo noted that Stefania Belmondo, the Italian cross-country skiing champion who lit the flame at the Turin Winter Olympics this year, was an Occitan speaker. “Because of her, Occitan was used in announcements at the Turin Games, but the television commentators were baffled because they didn’t know what it was,” he said. “No one knew how to translate it.”

An earlier Occitan celebrity, the writer Frédéric Mistral, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904. A poet from Provence, he wrote in Occitan — or Provençal — and even compiled a dictionary of the language. But Mistral is a largely forgotten figure, and there are fears that the language is dying out and being replaced by French, Spanish and Italian.

Organisers of the festival denied that there were plans for a political movement promoting “Occitania” as a nation. But they said that European laws offered protection of linguistic minorities, and they were campaigning for Occitan television and radio programmes as well as teaching the language in schools.

Dante, the medieval poet and author of The Divine Comedy, is said to have been the first writer to make a distinction between those who used oc for yes (derived from the Latin hoc), oui (originally oïl) and si. In De Vulgari Eloquentia he wrote: “nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil” (some say oc, others say si, others say oïl).

• Italy protested yesterday over plans by Austria to change its constitution to give Vienna “protection rights” over the Italian region of Alto Adige.

  Alto Adige, or South Tyrol, formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, when it passed to Italy after the First World War. It was annexed by the Nazi Reich from 1943 to 1945 but returned to Italy after the Second World War.

  Andreas Khol, the Speaker of the Austrian Parliament, told the Tiroler Tageszeitung that Austria was entitled to ensure that the rights and culture of German speakers in Alto Adige were protected. He said that an amendment to the constitution would be tabled this month. The Italian Foreign Ministry called the move “surprising and anachronistic” and said that it was “in apparent contradiction to the spirit of mutual trust and collaboration” between two EU members.

  TALKING POINTS

• The language declined during the French Revolution but enjoyed a 19th-century revival

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