Occitano-Romance (Catalan: llengües occitanoromàniques; Occitan: lengas occitanoromanicas; Aragonese: luengas occitanoromanicas) is a branch of the Romance language group that encompasses the Catalan/Valencian, Occitan languages and sometimes Aragonese, spoken in parts of southern France and northeastern Spain.
[1][2] The group covers the languages of the southern part of France (Occitania including Northern Catalonia), eastern Spain (Catalonia, Valencian Community, Balearic Islands, La Franja, Carche, Northern Aragon), together with Andorra, Monaco, parts of Italy (Occitan Valleys, Alghero, Guardia Piemontese), and historically in the County of Tripoli and the possessions of the Crown of Aragon.
One of the main proponents of the unity of the languages of the Iberian Peninsula was Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and for a long time, others such as Swiss linguist Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (Das Katalanische, Heidelberg, 1925) have supported the kinship of Occitan and Catalan.
For instance, the Provençal troubadour, Albertet de Sestaró, says: "Monks, tell me which according to your knowledge are better: the French or the Catalans?
In many occasions throughout history, people have disregarded it and label it as a Spanish dialect, mainly because of extralinguistic reasons such as its small extension and the fact that it's spoken in rural areas.
Many of the loanwords that entered Aragonese were names of new concepts, but many others were basic words of the everyday life such as numbers or the days of the week.
For example with the sentence "We are here" we can see the difference in use of the verb "to be" when used to talk about a location: Romance languages form what it is called a linguistic continuum.
The answer to the question of whether Gascon or Catalan should be considered dialects of Occitan or separate languages has long been a matter of opinion or convention, rather than based on scientific ground.
For the very first time, a quantifiable, statistics-based approach was applied by Stephan Koppelberg in attempt to solve this issue.
[12] Based on the results he obtained, he concludes that Catalan, Occitan, and Gascon should all be considered three distinct languages.
More recently, Y. Greub and J.P. Chambon (Sorbonne University, Paris) demonstrated that the formation of Proto-Gascon was already complete at the eve of the 7th century, whereas Proto-Occitan was not yet formed at that time.
[13] These results induced linguists to do away with the conventional classification of Gascon, favoring the "distinct language" alternative.
Due to the evolution of the word ÁRBORE(M) in Aragonese, this example doesn't show the conservation of -e or -o that prevents a terminal consonant cluster.
Some examples: A noticeable difference heard by speakers of Catalan and Aragonese is the use of rounded vowels in Occitan.
Most Catalan dialects and the Ibero-Romance languages distinguish between the pronoun used as a subject EGO and the object of a preposition MIHĪ̆, while both Aragonese and Occitan use the descendant of EGO: Moreover, Aragonese and Occitan do not have proparoxytones, words with stress on the antepenultimate (third last) syllable.