Pierre Bec is an Occitan poet and linguist. Born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, 1921, he spent his childhood in Comminges

Comminges

The Comminges is an ancient region of southern France in the foothills of the Pyrenees, corresponding closely to the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens in the department of Haute-Garonne...

, where he learnt Occitan. He was deported to Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 between 1943 and 1945. After returning, he studied in Paris, where he graduated in 1959. He was one of the founders of the Institut d'Estudis Occitans (Institute for Occitan studies, IEO), and its president as well from 1962 to 1980.

He is also titular professor at Poitiers

Poitiers

Poitiers is a city on the Clain river in west central France. It is a commune and the capital of the Vienne department and of the Poitou-Charentes region. The centre is picturesque and its streets are interesting for predominant remains of historical architecture, especially from the Romanesque...

 university and assistant director of the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (Centre for high studies in medieval civilisation). He is considered one of the most important specialists in Occitan dialectology

Dialectology

Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...

 and in mediaeval Occitan literature. His activity is distributed among Occitanist politics, philological research and literary creation. He collaborated with publications like Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, Revue de Linguistique Romane, Estudis Romànics, Oc.

In 1982 he took part in the Linguistic Normalisation commission for Aranese, with Jacme Taupiac and Miquèu Grosclaude: they established some linguistics norms, officialised in 1983, following IEO's indications for Gascon

Gascon language

Gascon is usually considered as a dialect of Occitan, even though some specialists regularly consider it a separate language. Gascon is mostly spoken in Gascony and Béarn in southwestern France and in the Aran Valley of Spain...

.

Literature

• Petite anthologie de la lyrique occitane du Moyen Âge (1954)
• Les saluts d'amour du troubadour Arnaud de Mareuil (1961)
• La langue occitane (1963)
• Manuel pratique de Philologie romane (1970–1971)
• Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours (1984)
• Chants d'amour des femmes troubadours (1995)
• Au briu de l'estona (1955) poesia
• Sonets barròcs entà Iseut (1979) poesia
• Lo hiu tibat (1978) novel·la
• Sebastian (1980) novel·la
• Raconte d’una mort tranquilla (1993) narració
• Contes de l'unic (1977) narració

Linguistics

• Manuel pratique d'occitan moderne (Picard, 1973; 2e édition 1983)
• Manuel pratique de philologie romane (Picard, 1970 (vol. 1), 1971 (vol. 2) - reedit. 2000)
• Les Interférences linguistiques entre gascon et languedocien dans les parlers du Comminges et du Couserans (PUF, 1968): Essai d'aréologie systématique.

Importance for Gallo-Cisalpine language(s)

As a linguist, Pierre Bec stated, within his Manuel pratique de Philologie romane (2nd volume, p. 316) that some kind of diachronical unity holds between Rhaeto-Romance languages (i.e. Romansh, Friulian

Friulian language

Friulan , is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaeto-Romance family, spoken in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. Friulan has around 800,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom also speak Italian...

 and Ladin) and Northern Italian or Cisalpine ones (Western Lombard, Eastern Lombard

Eastern Lombard language

Eastern Lombard is a group of related languages, spoken in the eastern side of Lombardy, mainly in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua, in the area around Crema and in a part of Trentino . Its main variants are Bergamasque and Brescian ....

, Piedmontese

Piedmontese language

Piedmontese is a Romance language spoken by over 2 million people in Piedmont, northwest Italy. It is geographically and linguistically included in the Northern Italian group . It is part of the wider western group of Romance languages, including French, Occitan, and Catalan.Many European and...

, Venetan

Venetian language

Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia...

, Emiliano-Romagnolo and Ligurian

Ligurian language (Romance)

Ligurian is a Gallo-Romance language spoken in Liguria in Northern Italy, parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of France, Monaco and in the villages of Carloforte and Calasetta in Sardinia. Genoese , spoken in Genoa, the capital of Liguria, is its most important dialect...

). This issue has been further investigated by the Australian linguist Geoffrey Hull.