Gardiol () is the variety of Occitan still spoken today in Guardia Piemontese, Calabria.
UNESCO classifies it as "seriously in danger" of disappearing in its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. But on the contrary, Agostino Formica showed in 1999 that Gardiol Occitan was still surviving despite the small number of speakers. Similarly, Pietro Monteleone stressed that Gardiol remained the language in common use in family and friendly relations.
Gardiol is of origin. The population of Guardia Piemontese arrived from the Occitan Valleys of Piedmont in the 14th century, following the persecutions against the Waldensians. It is therefore related to the Vivaro-Alpine. However, Glottolog recognizes Gardiol as a distinct language within the Occitanic language family.
In 2007, according to the linguist Fiorenzo Toso, there are 340 Gardiol speakers out of 1,860 inhabitants, the others using either standard Italian or Calabrian. This is different to both Christopher Moseley, which said there were around 300 speakers (2005) and Agostino Formica, which said there were around 370 speakers (1999).
The following is a text taken from a manual by G. Ligozat.
If the Gardiols have always known that their language came from the Vaud Valleys of Piedmont, the Occitans of Piedmont took a long time to realize that their language was part of the whole of oc. Since the 1970s, the name Occitan has spread in the Occitan Valleys . This name was probably introduced to Guardia Piemontese by Arturo Genre, who also introduced the spelling of the Escolo dòu Po (whose principle is to note all the dialects with their local particularities). Hans-Peter Kunert, a German Romance scholar, developed the adaptation to Gardiol of the classical spelling of Occitan, which makes Gardiol readable outside Guardia despite the particularities that make spoken Gardiol difficult to understand for an Occitan from France. This has allowed the development of school materials as well as a Gardiol-Italian dictionary.