Description :
This radio programme from Ràdio País is part of the European Tramontana Network (Réseau Tramontana / Tramontana Network), co-funded by the European Union, a project dedicated to collecting, preserving and sharing oral histories, minority languages and cultural memories from rural European territories. In this episode, Jean Larzac reflects on the decline of the Occitan movement after the hopes of the 1960s and 1970s, while connecting the fate of Occitan to wider questions of cultural diversity, globalisation and social justice.
Larzac analyses what he sees as the weakening of Occitanist activism and thought, explaining that the movement faced both internal difficulties and broader historical forces. He describes a long process involving political centralisation, administrative domination and cultural assimilation, which he compares with wider patterns of linguistic and cultural erosion throughout the world. According to him, globalisation reinforces these pressures by favouring dominant languages and economic systems, but the disappearance of languages cannot be separated from earlier histories of conquest and unequal power relations.
The interview also explores Larzac’s personal relationship with language, which he describes as both intellectual and embodied. For him, defending Occitan is not only a cultural or political action but also an expression of human dignity, memory and resistance to injustice. Through poetry and religious reflection, he presents language as something deeply connected to identity, community and the human experience. The programme concludes with a call to preserve linguistic diversity and to continue transmitting languages as living forms of knowledge and humanity.