Pierre Bec spent his childhood in Cazères-sur-Garonne where he learned Gascon.
In 1938, he was an interpreter for the Spanish Republican refugees who had crossed the Pyrenees, and he discovered Catalan.
Bec was titular professor at Poitiers university and assistant director of the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (Centre for high studies in medieval civilisation).
His activity is distributed among Occitanist politics, philological research and literary creation.
[3] As a linguist, Pierre Bec stated, within his Manuel pratique de Philologie romane (2nd volume, p. 316) that some kind of diachronical unity holds between Rhaeto-Romance languages (i.e. Romansh, Friulian and Ladin) and Northern Italian or Cisalpine ones (Western Lombard, Eastern Lombard, Piedmontese, Venetan, Emiliano-Romagnolo and Ligurian).