Is Occitan 12 different languages?

http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/a-reclassification-of-the-occitan-language/

Splits Occitan from 5 languages to 12 separate languages.

This is the same guy. This linguist is a fanatical language splitter maniac. OTOH, he does try to split on solely scientific criteria, avoiding politics, sociology and the rest. He splits only on unintelligibility, splitting only and all lects that are mutually unintelligible. I don't think there's much politics going on here.

As I see it, though, don't the Occitanists see all of Occitan as one language? Mostly for political reasons? In that the language is dying as it is, so they don't want to split it up further and make it die even more than it already is.

I also think it is interesting that Catalan and Occitan are so close. They are nearly intelligible.

Also I did not know that Occitan was spoken all the way over in Italy.

Gascon
Languedocien
Provencal
Nicard
Mentonasque
Limousin
North Auvergnat
South Auvergnat
Alpine Provencal
Gardiol (Italy)
Northern Gavot
Transalpin Provencal (Italy)

12 languages. I never even heard of a lot of those. So Occitan is a macrolanguage also?

Aranese (Spain)

What is a macrolanguage?

Aranese is part of Gascon, I thought?

A macrolanguage is said to be a language which is apparently made up of more than one language with many closely related languages around it.

For instance, Chinese, German and Italian are macrolanguages. Chinese is not one languages. It is at least 14 languages and possibly many more. German is at least 20 languages and could be a lot more. Italian has many "dialects" that are actually separate languages.

Don't believe this man (Robert Lindsay). His linguistic knowledge is rather limited, and the only criteria he uses to determine if two varieties are the same language or not is simply mutual intelligibility, which is quite controversial and relative.

What do you mean his linguistic knowledge is relative? Isn't he a linguist?

Is there a better way of dividing language and dialects than mutual intelligibility?

Grand mercé, Burnaurmel.

"Grand mercé" is Occitan, no?

hm, don't visit that guy's "about" page

Is Occitan 12 different languages?

It is just a modern concept to rassemble southern dialects in a word, since indeed, a lot of different dialects were spoken in southern france (still called "langues d'oc").