Abstract

This article aims to detect language awareness in the Occitan grammars of the Middle Ages. Therefore, we analyse the most prominent grammars of the time, the Razos de trobar (c. 1190–1213), the Donatz proensals (c. 1225–1245), and the Leys d’amors (1328/1332–1356). In Western Europe, Latin was the dominant literary language of the time and in philosophy or language theory it was simultaneously used as a metalanguage and an object language. Hence, other languages and varieties were normally not mentioned in written documents. Early evidence of naming other languages than Latin, at least indirectly, can be found in the Germanic laws of the Migration Period, as the Lex Salica (507–511), the Lex Ribuaria (7th c.) or the Leges Langobardorum (7th c.), because they had to treat legal differences of different ethnic groups in a certain territory. In the named Occitan grammars however, we observe the attempt to define a common language area based on a literary tradition. These grammars, which are also poetics, try to define an Occitan Koiné in the sense of a perfect literary language for the poetry of the troubadours (parladura drecha). These efforts to distinguish the own language (lenga lemosina, proensal) from neighbouring languages, which are partly ascribed to other literary genres, give us an insight into the awareness of languages and varieties of this period.