Béarnais and Gascon today: language behavior and perception

Corporate social responsibility reporting in Qatar: a descriptive analysis

“…Today, many of the people within the Béarn still speak a dialect as well as Frenchgenerally speaking, Gascon or Béarnais. Several localised variations of these dialects also exist and there is considerable debate concerning their linguistic roots (Brock, 2008;Moreux, 2004); regardless of these debates, language is central to identity in the Béarn. In describing the relationship of language and identity in the music of Nadau, Christophe Labes points to a "society of memory which unites multiple identities and allegiances to its territory and its history … This land is one of heritage, of words and of a common language which has resisted the resources and strategies mobilised to eradicate it."…”

“…(Esteve, n/d) Some clarification is given by sociolinguist Bernard Moreux, who notes that the term Béarnais is not based purely on language but on a long and well-established social and cultural history. (Moreux, 2004) Gascon, on the other hand, refers to a group of Romance language variations, of which Béarnais is one. According to Moreux, we can therefore refer to a Gascon-speaking region, in which both Béarnais and Gascon are spoken and taught.…”

2. Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change: a case study of sociophonetic data from Occitan

“…In the entire gascon region, the highest concentration of speakers exists in Béarn, making béarnais the principal surviving dialect. Moreux (2004) suggests that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about 40,000 fluent native speakers of Occitan in Béarn, noting that the large majority of these speakers were over the age of 65 and rural dwellers.…”

Béarnais (Gascon)

“…In the entire historically Gascon-speaking region, the number of speakers, at all levels of proficiency, varies from 3% of the population in Bordeaux to 30% in Béarn, approximately 500,000 speakers in total, with the region of Béarn attesting the most vitality in the autochthonous variety (Moreux 2004: 25). These numbers include fluent native speakers and semi-speakers.…”

“…This variety may also be referred to by its autoglossonym ‘Biarnés’ though the French term is the most widely used designation for the regional language. The number of Gascon speakers in south-western France increases steadily from north (Bordeaux) to south (the Pyrenees) and because Béarn is the area of linguistic Gascony with the highest recorded number of Gascon speakers (Moreux 2004), Béarnais may be considered the principal surviving dialect of Gascon, though other surviving dialects, such as ‘Gascon de Chalosse’, and ‘Landais’, are still spoken and written.…”