'Patois is Not a Language: Rethinking Revitalization from the Ground Up' |CMDR Seminar, 9 April 2026

This talk explores why language revitalization efforts often fail to gain traction among traditional speakers, drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in Provence. Focusing on the persistent failure of the Occitan movement to mobilize its base, I argue that revivalists and traditional speakers were not simply using different labels for the same object, but were engaged in radically different ways of conceiving what language is. While revivalists treated patois as a deficient version of language to be codified and elevated, the traditional speakers I worked with insisted — often literally — that patois is not a language at all. I interpret this as an ontological rather than ideological divergence, with significant implications for how we understand language movements globally. Rather than dismiss such claims as signs of alienation, I suggest we take them seriously — as expressions of a world in which language is inseparable from place, practice, and relation. These tensions are not unique to Europe. They invite us to rethink the foundational assumptions of revitalization frameworks, especially in multilingual contexts where the very category of “language” may not be universally shared. About Prof James Costa: James Costa is professor of linguistic anthropology at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He has worked on issues of revitalization in Scotland and Provence and standardization in Scotland. He is currently starting a new project on the origins and developments of language revival activities in Cornwall.