Japonic orJapanese–Ryukyuan (Japanese:日琉語族,romanized: Nichiryū gozoku) is alanguage family comprisingJapanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and theRyukyuan languages, spoken in theRyukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted bylinguists, and significant progress has been made in reconstructing theproto-language,Proto-Japonic.[1] The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties, probably before the 7th century. TheHachijō language, spoken on theIzu Islands, is also included, but its position within the family is unclear.
Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to theJapanese archipelago from theKorean peninsula with theYayoi culture during the 1st millennium BC. There is some fragmentary evidence suggesting that Japonic languages may still have been spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula (seePeninsular Japonic) in the early centuries AD.
Possible genetic relationships with many other language families have been proposed, most systematically withKoreanic, but no genetic relationship has been conclusively demonstrated.
The extant Japonic languages belong to two well-defined branches: Japanese and Ryukyuan.[2]Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern Kyushu from theKorean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of theYayoi culture and spread throughout theJapanese archipelago, replacing indigenous languages.[3][4][a]The former wider distribution ofAinu languages is confirmed by placenames in northernHonshu ending in-betsu (from Ainupet 'river') and-nai (from Ainunai 'stream').[7][8][9]Somewhat later, Japonic languages also spread southward to theRyukyu Islands.[3] There is fragmentary placename evidence that now-extinct Japonic languages were still spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula several centuries later.[10][11]
Japanese is the de facto national language ofJapan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation isOld Japanese, which was recorded usingChinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries.[12]It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences.[13] The script also distinguished eight vowels (or diphthongs), with two each corresponding to moderni,e ando.[14] Most of the texts reflect the speech of the area aroundNara, the eighth-century Japanese capital, but over 300 poems were written ineastern dialects of Old Japanese.[15][16]
The language experienced a massive influx ofSino-Japanese vocabulary after the introduction ofBuddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and the 9th centuries.[17] The loanwords now account for about half the lexicon.[18] They also affected the sound system of the language by adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals, and geminate consonants, which became separatemorae.[19]Most of the changes in morphology and syntax reflected in the modern language took place during theLate Middle Japanese period (13th to 16th centuries).[20]
The early capitals of Nara andKyoto lay within the western area, and theirKansai dialect retained its prestige and influence long after the capital was moved toEdo (modern Tokyo) in 1603. Indeed, the Tokyo dialect has several western features not found in other eastern dialects.[22]
The Ryukyuan languages were originally and traditionally spoken throughout theRyukyu Islands, anisland arc stretching between the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and theisland of Taiwan. Most of them are considered "definitely" or "critically endangered" because of the spread of mainland Japanese.[26]
Since Old Japanese displayed several innovations that are not shared with Ryukyuan, the two branches must have separated before the 7th century.[27] The move from Kyushu to the Ryukyus may have occurred later and possibly coincided with the rapid expansion of the agriculturalGusuku culture in the 10th and 11th centuries.[28] Such a date would explain the presence in Proto-Ryukyuan of Sino-Japanese vocabulary borrowed fromEarly Middle Japanese.[29] After the migration to the Ryukyus, there was limited influence from mainland Japan until the conquest of theRyukyu Kingdom by theSatsuma Domain in 1609.[30]
Ryukyuan varieties are considered dialects of Japanese in Japan but have little intelligibility with Japanese or even among one another.[31] They are divided into northern and southern groups, corresponding to the physical division of the chain by the 250 km-wideMiyako Strait.[26]
(Central) Okinawan, spoken in the central and southern parts of Okinawa Island, and neighboring islands. The prestige dialect is spoken inNaha, and the former city ofShuri. The Shuri dialect was the lingua franca of the Ryukyuan Kingdom, and was first recorded in the 16th century, particularly in theOmoro Sōshi anthology.[26][34]
There is no agreement on the subgrouping of the varieties. One proposal, adopted by the UNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger, has three subgroups, with the central "Kunigami" branch comprising varieties from Southern Amami to Northern Okinawan, based on similar vowel systems and patterns of lenition of stops.[35] Pellard suggests a binary division based on shared innovations, with an Amami group including the varieties from Kikai to Yoron, and an Okinawa group comprising the varieties of Okinawa and smaller islands to its west.[36]
Yonaguni, spoken onYonaguni Island, is phonologically distinct but lexically closer to other Yaeyama varieties.[37]
The southern Ryukyus were settled by Japonic-speakers from the northern Ryukyus in the 13th century, leaving no linguistic trace of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.[30]
Post-war geolinguistic studies have identified bundles ofisoglosses, often coinciding with geographic features.[38]
A large bundle, running north–south through theJapanese Alps, forms the basis of the traditional East–West dialect division.[39][40]
Another set of isoglosses separates peripheral areas, mainly northernHonshu and westernKyushu but alsoIzumo and the southern part of theKii Peninsula, from the central area. Numerous innovations have spread through the central area, with the peripheral areas preserving older forms.[41][42] Researchers have found it more difficult to explain other isoglosses in which peripheral areas share mergers of pitch accent classes and reduction of vowel sequences that are preserved in the central area, particularly theKansai region.[43][44]
Several isoglosses run roughly east–west, fromFukushima to the western end ofHonshu, and corresponding to the 0 °Cisotherm and 1000 mmisohyet.[45]
An alternative classification, based mainly on the development of thepitch accent, groups the highly divergentKagoshima dialects of southwestern Kyushu with Ryukyuan in a Southwestern branch.[46]Kyushu and Ryukyuan varieties also share some lexical items, some of which appear to be innovations.[47]The internal classification by Elisabeth de Boer includes Ryukyuan as a deep subbranch of a Kyūshū–Ryūkyū branch:[48]
Japonic
Eastern
Central
Izumo–Tōhoku
Kyūshū–Ryūkyū
She also proposes a branch consisting of theIzumo dialect (spoken on the northern coast of western Honshu) and theTōhoku dialects (northern Honshu), which show similar developments in the pitch accent that she attributes to sea-borne contacts.[49]
There is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula.[10][11] Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan asInsular Japonic.[4]
The most-cited evidence comes from chapter 37 of theSamguk sagi (compiled in 1145), which contains a list of pronunciations and meanings of placenames in the former kingdom ofGoguryeo. As the pronunciations are given usingChinese characters, they are difficult to interpret, but several of those from central Korea, in the area south of theHan River captured fromBaekje in the 5th century, seem to correspond to Japonic words.[4][50] Scholars differ on whether they represent the language of Goguryeo or the people that it conquered.[4][51]
Traces from the south of the peninsula are very sparse:
TheSilla placenames listed in Chapter 34 of theSamguk sagi are not glossed, but many of them can be explained as Japonic words.[4]
A single word is explicitly attributed to the language of the southernGaya confederacy, in Chapter 44 of theSamguk sagi. It is a word for 'gate' and appears to have a similar form to theOld Japanese wordto2, with the same meaning.[53][54]
Vovin suggests that the ancient name for the kingdom ofTamna onJeju Island,tammura, may have a Japonic etymologytani mura 'valley settlement' ortami mura 'people's settlement'.[55] He also proposes Japonic etymologies for two other local words.[56]
According toShirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language.[57] None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family.[4]
The most systematic comparisons have involvedKorean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japonic languages.[58]Samuel Elmo Martin, John Whitman, and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences.[4][59][60] However,Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting that the former is an early loan from Korean.[61] He suggests that to eliminate such early loans, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese.[62] That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic.[63]
Most Japonic languages havevoicing opposition forobstruents, with exceptions such as the Miyako dialect of Ōgami.[64]Glottalized consonants are common in North Ryukyuan languages but are rarer in South Ryukyuan.[65][37]Proto-Japonic had only voiceless obstruents, likeAinu and proto-Korean.Japonic languages also resemble Ainu and modern Korean in having a singleliquid consonant phoneme.[66]A five-vowel system like Standard Japanese/a/,/i/,/u/,/e/ and/o/ is common, but some Ryukyuan languages also have central vowels/ə/ and/ɨ/, and Yonaguni has only/a/,/i/, and/u/.[26][67]
In most Japonic languages,speech rhythm is based on a subsyllabic unit, themora.[68] Each syllable has a basic mora of the form (C)V but anasal coda,geminate consonant, orlengthened vowel counts as an additional mora.[69] However, some dialects in northern Honshu or southern Kyushu have syllable-based rhythm.[70]
Like Ainu,Middle Korean, and some modernKorean dialects, most Japonic varieties have a lexicalpitch accent, which governs whether the moras of a word are pronounced high or low, but it follows widely-different patterns.[66][71] In Tokyo-type systems, the basic pitch of a word is high, with an accent (if present) marking the position of a drop to low pitch.[72] In Kyushu dialects, the basic pitch is low, with accented syllables given high pitch.[73] In Kyoto-type systems, both types are used.[74]
Japonic languages, again like Ainu and Korean, areleft-branching (orhead-final), with a basicsubject–object–verb word order, modifiers before nouns, andpostpositions.[75][76] There is a clear distinction between verbs, which have extensiveinflectional morphology, and nominals, withagglutinative suffixing morphology.[77][78]Ryukyuan languages inflect all adjectives in the same way as verbs, while mainland varieties have classes of adjectives that inflect as nouns and verbs respectively.[79]
Proto-Japonic words are generally polysyllabic, with syllables having the form (C)V. The following proto-Japonic consonant inventory is generally agreed upon, except that some scholars argue for voiced stops*b and*d instead of glides*w and*j:[84]
The Old Japanese voiced consonantsb,d,z andg, which never occurred word-initially, are derived from clusters of nasals and voiceless consonants after the loss of an intervening vowel.[85]
Some authors also propose a high central vowel*ɨ.[87][88]The mid vowels*e and*o were raised to Old Japanesei andu respectively, except word-finally.[89][90]Other Old Japanese vowels arose from sequences of Proto-Japonic vowels.[91]
It is generally accepted that a lexicalpitch accent should be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic, but its precise form is controversial.[85]
^Roy Andrew Miller identified the arrival of Japonic with theEarly Jōmon period (c. 3000 BC), but this is difficult to reconcile with the relatively shallow depth of Japonic and the presence of Japonic placenames on the Korean peninsula in the 1st millennium AD.[5][6]
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