Occitan, also known by its native speakers as lenga d'òc, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys and the Val d'Aran in northeast Spain; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in the southern Italian province of Cosenza, where it is referred to as Gardiol, which is considered a separate Occitanic language. The linguistic distance between Catalan and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects, and Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative. Occitan has a particularly rich lexicon. Lo Panoccinari, considered the most comprehensive dictionary ever published in this language, records over 250,000 unique words.