Occitan is spoken by about 550,000 people, most of whom learned it as a second language. Published totals range from 100,000 to 800,000, and up to seven million people understand some.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Catalan, French and French (Canada). If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, verbs usually come before their objects; words are built from many smaller pieces, which our course teaches piece by piece.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Occitan sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,663 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 758 hours of study. Read how it works.
Most apps only teach Occitan through English, if they teach it at all. These starting languages already have a built course, and any other published language can be paired on request:
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded; the difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.