This article explores tense usage and tense-switching in the temporal structuring of Occitan and French oral narratives, drawing on theoretical frameworks in linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as perspectives from anthropology and folklore studies. It forms part of a larger project, ExpressioNarration, financed by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship, incorporating the creation of a digitized corpus of oral narratives that has served as the dataset for an analysis of three major temporal phenomena in discourse, notably tenses, frame introducers, and connectives. Our objective in this article is to analyze the use of different tenses on the narrative line and the phenomenon of tense-switching in narratives that reflect different degrees of orality, with a particular focus on the relationship between temporal patterns and questions relating to the channel of transmission, the sources of the narratives, and their performance context. 2 Tense usage and tense-switching have been investigated from a range of theoretical perspectives in various types of oral narrative in French (conversational, performed, medieval, modern, and so forth) and indeed in many other languages (see Section 1, below). However, despite considerable discussion in the literature regarding the scalar nature of orality (see Section 2.1, below), research on tense patterns in oral narrative has generally not integrated this notion of scalarity into the analysis. Yet for minoritized languages, where a rich oral narrative tradition is often found, sharp divides between neat categories such as "oral" and "written" are not meaningful, given the complexities around questions relating to transmission, sources, and performance of stories. Moreover, a number of other factors can influence linguistic usage, including the status of different languages, the strength of revitalization movements, the impact of language contact, diachronic and diatopic variation, the role of story-type, questions of individual style, as well as language competency in bilingual contexts. In this paper, we take oral narrative in Occitan as a case study through which to explore the relationship between tense

The authors gratefully acknowledge