Editor’s Note

This issue of Tenso marks a real first, with the publication of our first article about Occitan composed in Occitan. It has taken some time for Occitan to mark its space as a legitimate scientific language—the effort requires a good deal of devotion on the part of researchers and users. However, scholars are making the effort to establish Occitan as an equal to other European languages; publishing research in the language is part of that effort, seen, for example, in the recent collection of essays, Nouvelles recherches en domaine occitan (reviewed in this issue), and in conference papers delivered at the congresses of the Association internationale d’études occitanes.

Occitan’s history is not that of French, with an Académie française to normalize usage, nor that of English, where other forces have unified patterns and established norms. Many Occitanophones recognize their dialect, be it Auvergnat, Gascon, Languedocian, Limousin, or Provençal, before they recognize Occitan as the global identifier of the lenga d’oc. In this reality, it is difficult to find consensus on elements of usage. Louise Esher, a young scholar who acquired Occitan, not at her mother’s knee, but by working with native speakers from the departments of the Tarn, Haute-Garonne, Aude, and Ariège, is a strong believer in supporting the forms and usages she heard and learned. She has affirmed that her practice, “when presenting, writing or publishing in Occitan, is to use the established conventions of the grafia classica for grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the structural features of the variety which I am competent in.” Thus, in an article on verb endings, she may encounter resistance from readers who expect verb endings to be those “taught in school,” as it were. Her choices put her in the line of fire of those who expect writers to adhere to a norm, whether that norm be standard Occitan, or standard Languedocian, or some other standard of a chosen Occitan dialect. It may be that English speakers, having learned a language that is less insistent on norms, are more willing to push this envelope. Most importantly, un brave mercé per la volontat d’escriure en occitan!