in English
Gilbert Nariòo was born in Bearn near Orthez. He graduated as a teacher in Paris in 1948, where he was stigmatised because of his Gascon accent. Unable to bear the sarcams of which he was a victim, he left the French National Education System and refused to adopt the imposed "pointu" [sharp] French standard accent. Once in the military service in Germany, though, he was complimented for speaking German and English so well. He understood then that this was due to the phonetic richness of the Gascon Occitan he learned from his mother, a linguistic variant which possesses, among others, the sound of H.
He has been working in Europe and Africa, mainly in the aluminium industry. While employed as a technical trainer, he happened to learn Catalan, Spanish and Languedoc Occitan, thus acquiring a good command of those languages. When in Greece, he decided equally to teach through the medium of Greek. A member of Per Noste Edicions in Orthez since 1968, he was its president for twenty-five years, succeeding its founder Roger Lapassade.
He has coauthored the Petit dictionnaire français-gascon (1000 pages, 50000 entries) and a number of articles and poems for the cultural magazine País Gascons , as well as a une chronicle titled Ben Parlar [Speaking well] for bothlearners and teachers. He has also translated into Gascon Occitan many Catalan books, such as La Bíblia Valenciana[The Valencian Bible] by Rafael Tasis. He has taught Languedoc and Gascon Occitan distance courses for over twenty years for the Collège d’Occitanie.
-> Access to his page at the FIMOC website.