I’ve decided that while I continue to work on Italian, I’m going to allow myself to take some time to look at some of the less studied Romance languages. Having a working knowledge of the Ibero-Romance languages for more than 20 years, learning Italian intensively really highlighted my lack of knowledge of the language family and how it was skewed by my familiarity with only Portuguese, Galician, and Spanish. In an effort to satisfy my passion for minority languages, I’ve decided on picking up Catalan, Piedmontese, Romanian, and Sardinian to a B1 level. Most importantly, though, I’m going to take the time to make a comparison of them and perhaps dig into the transition from Vulgar Latin to Proto-Romance and then to the modern languages. Once thing that has made me very sad about my selection is that Occitan is not on the list. I’ve not been able to find a single native or fluent heritage speaker willing to teach it even informally. From what I have gathered from academic material published on the Internet it is all but moribund. Since its relationship with Catalan is similar to that of Brazilian Portuguese to Galician, I decided to give it a try instead. Catalan’s language community is very strong and very proud and there are a lot of resources available on the web as well as teachers and informal tutors on iTalki. For Piedmontese, Sardinian, and Romanian I’ll be learning through Italian so as to be sure that I do not get to distracted from my current plan of study.