Mind your language
My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-ofseason ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears in the Pyrenees.
Well I wasn’t eaten by a bear, but I did get an appetising sample of a language that I hardly knew existed. I don’t mean Basque, which is a language that does not belong to the Indo–European group. This one does, and it is called Aranese (Aranes by its speakers).
It is spoken in the valley of Aran, which had no proper road into it until a tunnel was completed. I had assumed therefore that Aranese was a mere dialect of Catalan with an admixture of Aragonese (which is pretty much like Castilian).
It was the name of a waterfall in the region that first struck me: Eth Sauth deth Pish. It has an Old Testament ring to it, though eth is merely the masculine singular definite article (the feminine being era). Deth is ‘of the’, and so figures frequently in business signs. There is the amusingly named Hotel Deth Tunel.
‘Ta força gent eth dimars ei eth dusau dia de trabalh dera setmana,’ it says in a little booklet I bought of 450 words you need to speak Aranese, which I think means, ‘For most people, Tuesday is the second working day of the week.’ A few hundred years isolated in a valley doesn’t produce a language like that. I discover that Aranese is one of the variants of Gascon, one of the dialects of Occitan. Most of the area where Gascon is spoken lies in the triangle of France bordered by the Pyrenees, the Atlantic and the river Garonne. Apart from Gascon, the most familiar dialects of Occitan are Provençal and Limousine.
Of the 7,000 or so people living in the Val d’Aran, perhaps 80 per cent use Aranese. The valley council supports it; it is taught in schools; public signs are in the language and some money goes to support books in the language. But it is easy to see that the road tunnel which let in profitable skiers and doctors’ conferences also serves, like television, to deflate the language balloon or to pump it up with volumes of outside influences. Aranese in the modern world is like the wild bear.
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