AHC: Occitan/Catalan-Wank

Could it be possible to get these two (or some close descendants) to become majority languages in *France and *Spain, respectively?
 
Could it be possible to get these two (or some close descendants) to become majority languages in *France and *Spain, respectively?
Short answer: no.

While it is certainly true that those languages could do better, possibly much better than OTL, you'd have to change history drastically to get them being the primary languages.
For Catalan, you'd have to prevent the Moorish conquests in Iberia, as OTL, the ruling nations were northern principalities that pushed south, which left the southern, ex-Muslim areas somewhat marginalized.

As for Occitan, you probably have to go back to Frankish times and prevent Paris from being the seat of the western Frankish kingdom. If Charlemagne's empire stayed united, maybe, just maybe, the cultural superiority of the south (which OTL played out in troubadors and such) being the magnet that made a southern dialect the prestige one.

But with such early PoDs, neither "Catalan" nor "Occitan", but rather related sister languages, would be the ones around.
 
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