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Clearly, Catalan and Occitan are very close languages. Catalan has more similarities in common with Occitan than with Spanish. On the other hand, Occitan has more similarities in common with Catalan than with French. Because of this, it makes no sense to classifly Catalan among Iberian Romance languages and Occitan among Gallo-Romance languages. Clearly, Catalan and Occitan form a well defined phylogenetic group: Occitano-Romance languages (the problem is including Occitano-Romance languages as a part of East Iberian Romance or, alternatively, Gallo-Romance is a difficult one) --Davius (talk) 20:52, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can tell, they're pretty closely related to each other. In written form they're so similar that I can read Occitan without ever having studied it, just using my knowledge of Catalan. The Occitano-Romance languages also share several common innovations with French that they do not share with Castilian, while I don't think they share many (if any at all) common innovations with Castilian that are not shared with French. So it's pretty clear that something is "wrong" with the POV that Catalan is Iberian, and it's probably politically motivated, but I can't put that in an article of course. Some other articles like Iberian Romance suffer from a similar POV issue, so I wonder if there is a way to bring this to wider attention. CodeCat (talk) 22:01, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From our own article Old Occitan, in fact, it appears that in the Early Occitan period (ca. 800–1000), Catalan had not yet diverged and was thus practically indistinguishable from Occitan. As far as I can see, there is no serious doubt that Occitan is the closest relative of Catalan and that the two form a highly coherent subgroup of Romance – in fact, the article Occitan language quotes two classifications by Bec and Sumien to the effect that on a dialectal level, Occitan is effectively identical to Occitano-Romance and Catalan constitutes merely a sub-subgroup or even sub-sub-subgroup respectively. The dialectal variety subsumed under the "Occitan" label appears to be considerable (even though the group is relatively close-knit and coherent within the Romance continuum), while the variety within Catalan seems to be much smaller, relatively speaking.
The confusion about Catalan, rather than due to political motivations, is, I think, a legacy of traditional 19th-century classifications of Romance, which grouped languages according to their alleged substrate, so that Catalan ended up as Ibero-Romance (because Iberian used to be spoken in what is now Catalonia) and Occitan as Gallo-Romance (because Gaulish used to be spoken in what is now Southern France – never mind the fact that Aquitanian was also spoken there and is the more likely substratum of Catalan and especially Gascon, i. e., the Aquitano-Pyrenean group: after all, Catalan was not the original Romance language of most of Catalonia, but some form of Mozarabic presumably, and thus Iberian can hardly have been the substratum of Catalan since Iberian was long extinct by the high medieval period when Catalan spread to the south). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:34, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The bizarre thing is that the Iberian Romance languages article classifies not just Catalan as one, but Occitan too. Like in this map: File:Lenguas y dialectos iberorromances.PNG. Yet in the lead section it also states that it consists of the languages that developed on the Iberian peninsula. Even if that may apply to the Catalan dialect, I highly doubt that Occitan as a whole came from Iberia! CodeCat (talk) 22:29, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Rua: Especially considering that we know that Old Catalan originated in the north, in the Pyrenees, and originally wasn't spoken south of the Ebro, since Mozarabic was spoken there (see also this animation). The Ibero-Romance traits of Catalan can easily have been acquired through early contact.
Considering the apparently almost complete absence of genuine, exclusive common innovations between the French–Arpitan group and Occitano-Romance, however – French–Arpitan exhibits the second lenition followed by the apocope, while in Occitano-Romance, the apocope is present without the second lenition ever having happened –, and the fact that the Rhaeto-Romance languages (most clearly Romansh) align decidedly more closely with French–Arpitan than with Occitano-Romance, I'm more inclined to the option to split Western Romance into several groups (not only the traditional binary Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance) altogether: Mozarabic (or Aragonese–Mozarabic?), Ibero-Romance (Portuguese, Astur-Leonese, Castilian, with Astur-Leonese closer to Portuguese), Occitano-Romance and Gallo-Romance (French/Oïl, Arpitan, Romansh, Ladin, Friulian, the substratum of Gallo-Italic and Venetian – themselves Italo-Romance, as this article indicates). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:10, 20 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
IMO, and as someone who speaks Aragonese and has read about its medieval form, the classification of the Pyrynean-Mozarabic languages is RIDICULOUS. It is so obvious that it was done when there weren't proper resources to check and compare the two languages. Practically all the traits used for that classification are present in Gascon-Occitan, and most of them also in Catalan. That's why I'd rather include Aragonese in the Occitano-Romance that in that pseudo-linguistic group. Jinengi (talk) 18:12, 3 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Aragonese does not seem to share any distinctive traits with Occitan–Catalan. Importantly, it has apparently never exhibited the apocope of -o, which is why I'm sceptical that it can be classified as Occitano-Romance: in Occitan–Catalan, the apocope happened very early, followed by final devoicing. While Aragonese differs in some points from Castilian, these are exactly those points where Castilian differs from Portuguese (and Astur-Leonese, I think) as well, but Aragonese matches Portuguese there, so it makes more sense to classify Aragonese as Ibero-Romance. (It also shares other typical Ibero-Romance traits, I think, even more so than Catalan.) These are just common inherited traits, archaisms, where Castilian has innovated.
I'm not sure where Mozarabic fits in – it seems broadly like Ibero-Romance, but has some conservative traits that are unusual in the context of Ibero-Romance, and I'm not sure if Aragonese shares any of them. On the face of it, classifying Morazabic and Aragonese together is not absurd, and not clearly "pseudo-linguistic", also considering that Aragonese may have been influenced by neighbouring Western Romance languages to lose some archaisms, and investigating the medieval form more closely might help understanding the possible relationships better. That there are dialects that appear to be intermediate between Catalan and Aragonese does not prove a close relationship (beyond Western Romance): Catalan may well have an Aragonese or Aragonese-like substratum south of the Pyrenees, as we know Catalan was not originally spoken well south of the Pyrenees (though the precise details are unclear), and probably simply encroached more and more on the local Aragonese-like dialects and replaced them, leading to these intermediate dialects in the west. Clearly, "Mozarabic" and "Aragonese" dialects were once adjacent as well. And considering that "Mozarabic" is thought to have been spoken once as far north as Huesca, Lleida and Tarragona, and close to Barcelona (compare this map), if not farther north, the geographical distinction between "Mozarabic" and "Aragonese" in the medieval period is unclear. So this may be the basis of assuming a close linguistic relationship, along with a few linguistic traits (such as the absence of the first lenition in Mozarabic as well as in certain Aragonese dialects). Now, we must be clear that "Mozarabic" is really a cover term for a number of different dialects in medieval Iberia that we don't know a lot about, which complicates the issue. So maybe we should better exclude them from classification altogether and classify Aragonese as a branch of Western Romance that may best be classified as part of Ibero-Romance but whose position is not completely settled. But it's most likely not Occitano-Romance. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:17, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
