This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 144
On a bike, you cannot help but read the world as you move through it. Road signs, horizons, corners, landscapes. I know I can't be the only cyclist who silently mouths village names as I roll by. Whether in my adopted Wales, my native Scotland, or on two-wheeled travels across the continent, my stubbornly Anglo-centric brain and tongue fumble their way around the syllables of whichever region I happen to be riding through.
The road encourages attentiveness – the need to study a map to scout out coffee stops or prepare for climbs. The valleys, mountains and plains that shape our sport also influence a region's language – or even languages, plural. For almost 2,000 years, Latin fractured and evolved into different tongues across Europe's mountains, rivers and frontiers. Accents, vocabularies and rhythms converge on plains, splinter at peaks, and diverge considerably in isolated areas. All this is before we throw in governance in the form of regulation, standardisation, suppression or revitalisation. We experience topography, typography and toponymy, all on two wheels.
Historically, France has had a tricky relationship with regional languages, the 'patois' (rough speech) coming from an old French word patoier, meaning to handle clumsily. The term became the standard dismissive term used by French authorities to describe any regional language or dialect – Occitan, Breton, Alsatian, Basque, the lot.
Since its inception, the Tour de France has rolled through the regions of many of these dialects. Founded in 1903 by the newspaper L'Auto as a circulation stunt, the race became something larger almost by accident – a travelling map of a nation still in the process of becoming one. Before the first pedal stroke, France had been on a 200 year journey to centralisation. In 1794 the 'Report on the necessity and means of annihilating the patois' meant French became the sole language of the Republic by decree.
The country remains one of the very few European Union countries that has signed but never ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, meaning its regional tongues have no constitutional protection whatsoever. A stark contrast to Catalonia, the host land of 2026 Grand Départ, with its three official languages: Catalan, Castilian and Aranese.
"In Catalonia, language and identity are deeply tied to politics," Rob Bianchi, the Director of Anglo Centres, a language school in Tarragona, tells Rouleur. Aberdare is not where you'd expect to find a famous cycling surname like Bianchi, but like many Italians at the time, Rob's parents left post-war Naples for the Welsh valleys. After studying history and politics, he had planned to return to his parents' homeland, but ended up in Catalonia. Marrying, starting a family, opening three language schools and even entering local politics, Bianchi has linguistically, culturally and emotionally integrated into Catalan life. Who better to explain the sociolinguistics of the 2026 Grand Départ – a man who has made multiculturalism his life?
"Some people may see the Tour's presence as recognition of Catalonia as distinct, but others may view it as simply a sporting event passing through Spain, without deeper meaning," explains Bianchi.
When it comes to its most famous sporting export, France carries its linguistic habits abroad at the Tour. Remember La Côte de Buttertubs from the 2014 Grand Départ in Yorkshire? This year on the official Tour maps, Barcelona is Barcelone.
"The Tour de France is a flagship of French national culture, so when it comes through Catalonia, it brings a French narrative framework – maps, commentary, storytelling – onto a place with its own strong identity," Bianchi believes. "For this reason, for some viewers that raises a question: whose perspective is shaping how this place is being presented to the world? It's not necessarily conflictual, but there's an awareness that Catalonia is being seen through an external lens.
"Most Catalan people would want organisers, broadcasters, and journalists to use Catalan names, since these are the legally recognised forms. Tarragona (not 'Tarragone'), 'Girona' (not 'Gerona') Lleida (not 'Lérida'). International media sometimes default to Spanish or French, in the case of the Tour, but this can feel outdated or dismissive."
Girona was known as Gerona – the Castilian Spanish spelling – until after Franco's dictatorship ended, and for Bianchi the old name still carries its historical baggage, an echo of a period when Catalan was systematically marginalised. It is a story not unlike that of the country of his birth. The Welsh word 'hiraeth' has no direct English translation, but means a longing for a home, a place or a time that no longer exists. Where Welsh gathers the feeling into a single word, Bianchi says Catalan distributes it across several: 'enyorança', the ache of longing; 'terra', the physical and cultural ground beneath your feet; 'país', the community and identity that make you who you are.
"Using Catalan names is generally seen as basic respect, not a political statement. Also, with regard to the language, it's not just spelling, how names are said matters, so broadcasters making an effort with Catalan pronunciation tends to be appreciated and even imperfect attempts are usually received positively."
Olga Àbalos, editor of Barcelona-based cycling magazine Volata, echoes Bianchi's desire for the Tour to use Catalan names for the 2026 Grand Départ, pointing to the examples of the other Grand Tours. "In La Vuelta a España, they tend to respect the local languages of Spain. In the Asturian language, they call it Alto de L'Angliru. With 'L' – apostrophe – 'Angliru'," said Àbalos, who was also heartened to see the Giro d'Italia use the cyrillic alphabet alongside the Latin on its official maps for the 2026 Bulgarian Grande Partenza.
"The Tour de France is a political tool. Lots of races are. They were created to show part of a country or a region that has a specific characteristic," she explains. "The Ronde van Vlaanderen joins all the places in Flanders that speak Flemish, for instance. Tro Bro Léon, in Brittany, was a way to give visibility to all the places where they speak Breton. The organiser of the race told me the route joined the dots between the schools where you can learn Breton."
The Tour may not visit Brittany this year, but the 2026 route is a road through landscape and language. It starts in a land where a once-suppressed tongue now has millions of speakers, but also passes regions where the local dialect is completely extinct. Here is our stage-by-stage account of what those languages are, what happened to them, and why.
Catalan / Català
Where: Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencian Community, La Franja area of Aragon, the Carche area of Murcia, Andorra, Roussillon and the city of L'Alguer / Alghero in Sardinia
Status: Co-official status in Catalonia (one of three official languages with Castilian and Aranese), the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands. Official status in Andorra
Speakers: ~ 5.35 million of Catalan population. ~ 10 million worldwide.
Percentage of population: ~ 80.4%
‘Vive le Tour!’: ‘Visca el Tour!’
Stages: 1 - 3
The majority of spectators lining the seafront for the stage one team time trial will be natural speakers of a language banned in public life as recently as 1975. According to the 2023 Survey of Language Uses of the Population, 5.35 million people in Catalonia can speak Catalan (80.4% of the population) and 93.4% can understand it. This is despite the language being suppressed in schools, publishing and public administration for nearly four decades during Franco's dictatorship.
"For locals in places like Tarragona there's genuine pride in showing Catalan culture to the world," says Bianchi, who lives in the start city of stage two. "The Tour can feel like a symbolic moment of visibility for Catalan language and identity, especially given historical suppression, but it's not a straightforward act of recognition. It's better understood as a global spectacle that creates space for local expression rather than a deliberate platform for it."
Stage three crosses the Pyrenees into France, finishing at Les Angles in the Pyrénées-Orientales – a département that was historically Catalan-speaking until it was ceded to France under the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Today around 35–37% of people there can still speak the language, though most are over 60 and Catalan has no official status on the French side of the border. The contrast with Barcelona, two days and one mountain range ago, is apparent.
There is another language nearby. Tucked about 30 kilometres off the stage three route lies the Val d'Aran, home to Aranese – a Gascon dialect of Occitan and the only variety of Occitan with official legal protection anywhere in the world (because it's in Spain, not France). Declared co-official throughout Catalonia in 2010, it is spoken by around 61% of the valley's 10,000 residents and, unusually for a minority language, its speaker numbers are growing. The 2026 Tour doesn't go there. But it is worth knowing it exists, just over the mountains – a small exception to almost everything else in this list.
Occitan / Lenga d'òc
Where: Occitània: southern France, part of Italy, and the Val d'Aran in Spain
Status: Aranese is the only recognised dialect of Occitan. No official status in France
Speakers: ~ 545,000
Percentage of population: ~ 7%
‘Vive le Tour!’: ‘Visca lo Tour!’
Stages (by dialect): Languedocien: stage 4, Gascon: stages 5 - 7, Limousin: stages: 8 - 9, Auvergnat: stage 10
Stage four drops from the Pyrenees to Carcassonne, and with it the race enters the vast territory of Occitan – or, what remains of it. Once the dominant language of the entire southern third of France, spoken from the Atlantic coast to the Alps and celebrated across medieval Europe as the tongue of the troubadours, Occitan is today listed by UNESCO as severely endangered in most of its forms. The 2020 survey by the Office Public de la Langue Occitane found around 545,000 speakers across the New Aquitaine and Occitanie regions combined – roughly 7% of the local population. The average speaker is male, 66 years old, and lives in a rural area. Among people under 45, the figure drops to around 2%.
The route passes through four distinct Occitan dialect zones, each with its own history. Stage four crosses the Languedocien heartland. Stages five to seven move into Gascon territory, arguably the most distinctive Occitan dialect (some linguists classify it as a separate language altogether). Pau, which the race passes through on stage five, was once the capital of the independent Kingdom of Navarre and later of Béarn, which was one of the last parts of France to retain Occitan in official administration, holding out until it joined France in 1620. Eleanor of Aquitaine and her son Richard I both spoke Gascon as a first language.
Stages eight and nine move into the Dordogne and Corrèze – the zone of Limousin Occitan, historically the prestige dialect of medieval court poetry. By stage ten, the race climbs into the Cantal and the volcanic plateau of the Massif Central, the home of Auvergnat.
The decline of all these dialects shares a common cause, and a common name: vergonha – Occitan for 'shame'. From the late 19th century onwards, French schools systematically punished children for speaking regional languages, instilling in generations of speakers the idea that their mother tongue was not a real language.
Although linguistically similar to Catalan, Occitan's survival is incomparable. Bianchi explained its demise: "The short answer is that Catalan kept or rebuilt institutions, domains of use, and social prestige, while Occitan largely lost them under a strongly centralising state. In Spain, there were also strong pressures toward the Spanish language, but the system ultimately evolved to allow autonomous regions to flourish after La Transición period from 1978 [following Franco's death]. Catalan has a full ecosystem which can be seen on TV, radio, in newspapers, publishing and in music, film and digital content. That keeps it normal in all domains, not just at home. Occitan has vibrant cultural activity, but far less mass media presence, which limits daily exposure for new generations."
The Langues d'Oïl
Where: Central/northern France
Status: Not recognised
Speakers: 0 (No modern count)
Percentage of population: 0%
Stages: 11 - 13
As the race moves north after its rest day in the Cantal, it crosses into territory where the linguistic story is perhaps the strangest of all. The area around Vichy and Nevers (Stage 11), and then Burgundy and Franche-Comté (Stages 12–13), was historically home to the Langues d'oïl – the northern Romance dialects from which modern standard French directly descended. Bourbonnais, Burgundian, Franc-Comtois: these are not dialects of French, they are its parents and grandparents, the varieties that gave birth to the French of the Île-de-France that eventually became the official language of the Republic.
So, unlike Occitan or Catalan, which were suppressed by an outside power, the oïl dialects were absorbed from within – gradually replaced by the standard French they created. There are no modern speaker counts because there are essentially no speakers to count.
Alsatian / Elsässisch
Where: Alsace region of northeastern France, bordering Germany and Switzerland
Status: No official status in France
Speakers: ~ 548,000 (last surveyed in 1999)
Percentage of population: 43%
‘Vive le Tour!’: ‘Es lebe d'Tour!’
Stage: 14
Stage 14 is the race's only significant engagement with the Vosges and Alsace, and it raises a question that this part of France has been asking for 150 years: which side of the border does it belong to? Alsatian is an Alemannic German dialect that has been spoken in this region since roughly 400 AD, and despite four changes of political sovereignty between France and Germany between 1871 and 1945, it never went away. The data is old, but according to the 1999 INSEE survey, 548,000 adults in Alsace spoke it – 43% of the adult population – though the figure among under-25s has since estimated to have collapsed to around 25%.
Alsatian is not the same as standard German. Its closest living relative is Swiss German, and a standard German speaker arriving in Alsace would struggle to understand a conversation in the local dialect. The two world wars left Alsatians in an impossible position: German-speaking in a country that had made French the symbol of republican identity, yet culturally distinct from the Germany that had twice annexed them by force. Post-1945, German was so thoroughly stigmatised that even many Alsatian speakers chose not to teach it to their children. A slow revival has been underway since the 1970s, and in 2023, immersion school programmes in Alsatian were finally restarted, but the generational gap is wide.
Arpitan / Arpetan / Franco-Provençal
Where: Arpitania: The Jura, Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Ain, Isère (Dauphiné), Loire, the Lyon area, some cantons of Switzerland and the Aosta Valley in Italy
Status: No official status in France
Speakers: No official data but there are an estimated 100,000 - 200,000 speakers across France, Italy, and Switzerland
Percentage of population: unknown
Stages: 15 - 20
The final mountain block of the 2026 Tour – the Alpine stages that will decide the race – passes through the territory of Arpitan, also known as Franco-Provençal: a Romance language so distinct from its neighbours that linguists in the 19th century had to invent a new category for it. It is not a dialect of Occitan or French. It sits between them, sharing features with both while belonging fully to neither, spoken historically across the Jura, Savoie, Dauphiné, and into Switzerland and the Aosta Valley in Italy.
Stages 15 and 16 pass through the Savoyard dialect zone around Évian-les-Bains and Thonon-les-Bains. Savoie only became part of France in 1860, less than 170 years ago. Savoyard speakers used to call their language sarde, because they were subjects of the Kingdom of Sardinia, not France. Stages 17 to 20 descend through the Dauphinois dialect zone toward Gap and, finally, the two summit finishes at Alpe d'Huez that are set to define the 2026 Tour.
Franco-Provençal is nearly extinct in France. Estimates suggest only a few thousand speakers remain, mostly elderly and rural. The one exception is the Aosta Valley in Italy, where around 55% of the population still reported knowledge of the language in the 2001 census, and where it has formal legal protection. Like the rest of the regional languages in France, Savoyard and Dauphinois dialects have almost no institutional support and no official status.
French / Français
Where: French mainland and beyond
Status: The only official language in France
Speakers: ~320 million worldwide
Percentage of population: +99%
Stage: 21
It would have been more accurate to have French as the primary language the moment the first wheel crossed the Pyrenean border, but I decided to leave it to the end. At the final stop on our linguistic tour of l'Hexagone, stage 21 arrives in Paris, and with it, French – the sole official language of the Republic, constitutionally enshrined since 1992, spoken by over 99% of the country's 68 million people. The Champs-Élysées finish is one the race's most iconic images and French is cycling's most iconic language: the tongue of the Tour's founding, its history, and – as we have learnt – its present. It is also, from a linguistic history perspective, the language that won: the one that absorbed, suppressed, or outlasted everything else on this list.
