Is Occitan dead?
Yes, Occitan is still used. It is mostly spoken in southern parts of France, Italian Occitan Valleys, Monaco and Spain’s Val d’Aran in northern Catalonia.
Why Spanish has a lisp?
Castilian Spanish of the Middle Ages had originally two distinct sounds for what we now think of as the “lisp”: the cedilla, and the z as in “dezir”. The cedilla made a “ts” sound and the “z” a “dz” sound. Both in time were simplified into the “lisp”, or what Spaniards call the “ceceo”.