Grammatical difference between (Standard) French and Langue d'oc

I just want to know this. I heard that many of the Langue d'oc are similar to several Spanish dialects but I'm really curious.

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on December 27, 2010 at 6:30pm

I think it depends a bit on what you're measuring.

Occitan (of which Languedocian is one variety) is in some respects closer to other Romance languages (including Spanish and Catalan) than it is to French. For example, like other Romance languages except French, the forms of Occitan verbs are generally distinct in all 6 persons (if you think about French, on the other hand, the "je","tu","il/elle" and "ils/elles" forms often sound identical). Occitan also shares some sound changes with Spanish (e.g. initial [f] changing to [h]).

On the other hand, Occitan has apparently acquired the feature of French of generally using the subject pronoun (whereas, e.g. in Spanish, it is usually ungrammatical to use the subject pronoun except for emphasis/focus).

It's always worth being suspicious of statements saying that "language X is more similar to language Y than French", because in general French is different to all the other Romance languages in some key ways (in particular, that certain forms generally sound the same in French-- e.g. singular/plural, various verb forms-- whereas in the other languages they are generally distinct).

You may be interested in looking at the first chapter of Posner, R., "The Romance Languages", which gives a summary of key grammatical features of the different Romance languages.