World Language Map

Where is Occitan spoken?

Occitan is an Indo-European language, spoken in France, Andorra, Italy, Monaco and 1 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Occitan is spoken

Occitan is spoken in 5 countries: France, Andorra, Italy, Monaco and 1 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
France3%2,051,238
AndorraNot givenNot given
ItalyNot givenNot given
MonacoNot givenNot given
SpainNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Occitan is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Occitan.

How many people speak Occitan?

Wikidata gives about 30,000 speakers (Linguistique romane 2012, 2030). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Occitan sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Occitan as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Southwestern Shifted Romance
  12. Occitanic
  13. Occitan

Related languages

Other languages in the Occitanic group:

More about Occitan

Codes: ISO 639-3 oci, Glottolog occi1239. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Occitan is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Occitan

Where is Occitan spoken?

Occitan is spoken in France, Andorra, Italy, Monaco and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 3% of the population of France, which is about 2,051,238 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Occitan?

Wikidata gives about 30,000 speakers (Linguistique romane 2012, 2030). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Occitan in?

Glottolog places Occitan in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance and Occitanic.

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