Provençal first names

A Provençal first name carries the same devotion and the same heritage as a French one, passed through another mouth. Étienne becomes Estève, Vincent becomes Vincèns, Claude becomes Glaude. The feminine ends in -o where French puts a silent -e, and affection is spoken through a cascade of diminutives: from Antòni comes Tòni, from Batisto comes Tistet then Titin, from Ounourat comes Nourat then Nato.

Three layers are stacked in this collection.

The oldest and the broadest comes from the Gospel and from the calendar of saints. It is shared with the whole of Christendom, but Provence adds its own, those whose relics lie in its churches: Ounourat, archbishop of Arles and founder of Lérins, who died in 429; Vitour, martyr of Marseille. Those names have never lapsed.

The second layer is a learned one. In the sixteenth century the taste for Antiquity arrived from Italy at the court of the Valois and travelled down into Provence, first among notables, then, through godparenthood and imitation, into modest families. Children were then baptised Scipioun, Aguste, Jùli, Titus, Lucrèço, Camihe, Ercule. Family memory kept from that fashion the idea that children were given the names of emperors. The reality is broader and slightly different: these are the names of Roman heroes, consuls, generals and men of letters as much as emperors.

Marius holds a place apart in that layer. The name owes less to the learned fashion than to the stubborn memory of the consul who crushed the Teutons and the Ambrones at the foot of Sainte-Victoire, in 102 before our era, and whose name stayed attached to the landscape: the Trésor du Félibrige still records a baus de Marius, an escarpment bearing his name. The country around Aix and Marseille handed it down through generations long before Pagnol made him the son of César on the Vieux-Port.

The third layer is recent and literary. Frédéric Mistral put into circulation first names that Provence then adopted as though they had always been its own: Mirèio, the heroine of the 1859 poem, and Calendau, from the Provençal name of Christmas, given to children born on the feast day. Magali came to them through the song Mistral set inside Mirèio.

Some first names pass for Provençal without being so. Manon is the clearest case: it is a French diminutive of Marie, which the cinema settled in Provence in the twentieth century and which no old Provençal dictionary knows.

The forms gathered here come from Frédéric Mistral's Trésor du Félibrige, from our own lexical base and from existing surveys. Each one was checked before being published; the forms we could not attest do not appear in this index.

Despite that care, errors may remain. If a form looks wrong to you, or if one is missing that your own sources attest, write to us at contact@linguanostra.org: any reasoned correction will be examined and the index amended.