‘Stuffed Latin’, or ‘latin farci’, is a term used for the incorporation of vernacular elements in Latin documents in (especially) southern France during the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth centuries. A number of the Latin documents from this period contain isolated words, or more importantly, phrases, and also proper names in Occitan. This is in some respects a curiosity: northern France does not exhibit the same pattern, although it has been associated with other Romance-speaking areas, and, in general, it is considered that this is a north–south divide, with the south following the practice and the north eschewing it. Explanations of the phenomenon have not always been entirely charitable: Clovis Brunel comments thus: ‘les rédacteurs des actes ont d'abord employé la langue vulgaire au milieu de phrases latines, quand leur ignorance ne leur permettait pas d'exprimer autrement leur pensée’. Nowadays, we would probably see this as a manifestation of perfectly normal language mixing rather than an illustration of linguistic or educational inadequacy.

The ways in which the Romance languages (including, in this case, Occitan) emerged greatly facilitated processes of this type. Occitan, like any other Romance variety, is very largely a direct linear descendant of Latin. Syntactically, to some extent morphosyntactically, and certainly in terms of a shared alphabet and lexis, a process essentially of combination of the two languages into a mixed language text is especially straightforward. Long before the tenth century, Latin coexisted with Romance varieties that were emerging in speech.