Occitan. Occitan, also known by its native speakers as lenga d'??c, sometimes also referred to as Proven??al, is a Romance language spoken in southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as in the Catalonian Val d'Aran; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in the southern Italian province of Cosenza. There it is referred to as Gardiol, which is considered a separate Occitanic language. The linguistic distance between Catalan and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects, and Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative. Occitan has a particularly rich lexicon. Lo Panoccinari, considered the most comprehensive dictionary ever published in this language, records over 250,000 unique words.
