A feature by Adrian Nathan West

Even more, perhaps, what mattered to me was to recreate the language my mother invented when she arrived in France, a trans-Pyrenean language, a language split in two, an inventive, joyous, poetic tongue that laughed at and manhandled the dominant language, and thereby opened new horizons of meaning. And this language, which my sisters and I called “Fragnol,” this language I was ashamed of when I was a girl but later loved with all my heart, could only have been invented between Spanish and French. With Catalan it would have been unthinkable.