The earliest traces of written Occitan go back to the tenth and eleventh centuries. They include legal documents written in a blend of Latin and Occitan, or latin farci (“stuffed Latin”), that is, Latin interspersed with vernacular elements. Typically, Latin is employed for the more impersonal passages and Occitan for passages in which the speaker engages himself more directly.

The oldest literary texts date from the same period. Their language is often difficult to determine precisely, in part because their transmission was unreliable. We have selected a tenth-century charm from folk medicine and, from the eleventh century, a bilingual dawn song with an Occitan refrain, a hymn to the Virgin, and a lyrical stanza. The stanza seems to have been written shortly before Guilhem IX of Aquitaine began to sing his songs. It differs from the other early texts in that it turns from ritualized incantation to expression of amorous desire. Like the dawn song, it seems to have been sung, since the transcription includes neumes, or musical lines; but in neither case did the scribe insert the notes. These four Occitan texts are anonymous and very short. Their transmission, compared to that of troubadour poems, was very frail. The charm and the amorous stanza were unknown until they were discovered in the margins of manuscripts in the 1980s.