Just as among Japanese dialects, which can have low mutual intelligibility, the Ryukyuan and mainland Japanese languages are notmutually intelligible. It is not known how many speakers of these languages remain, butlanguage shift toward the use ofStandard Japanese and dialects likeOkinawan Japanese has resulted in these languages becomingendangered;UNESCO labels four of the languages "definitely endangered" and two others "severely endangered".[2]
Phonologically, the Ryukyuan languages have some cross-linguistically unusual features. Southern Ryukyuan languages have a number ofsyllabic consonants, including unvoiced syllabic fricatives (e.g. ŌgamiMiyako/kss/[ksː] 'breast').Glottalized consonants are common (e.g. YuwanAmami/ʔma/[ˀma] "horse"). Some Ryukyuan languages have a central close vowel rather than the more common front and back close vowels [i] and [u], e.g. Yuwan Amami/kɨɨ/ "tree". Ikema Miyako has avoiceless nasal phoneme/n̥/. Many Ryukyuan languages, like Standard Japanese and most Japanese dialects, have contrastivepitch accent.
Ryukyuan languages are generallysubject–object–verb (SOV) order,dependent-marking, modifier-head,nominative-accusative languages, like Japanese. Adjectives are generallybound morphemes, occurring either with noun compounding or using verbalization. Many Ryukyuan languages mark bothnominatives andgenitives with the same marker. This marker has the unusual feature of changing form depending on ananimacy hierarchy. The Ryukyuan languages havetopic andfocus markers, which may take different forms depending on the sentential context. Ryukyuan also preserves a special verbal inflection for clauses with focus markers—this unusual feature was also found inOld Japanese, but lost in Modern Japanese.[3]
The Ryukyuan languages belong to theJaponic language family, related to theJapanese language.[4][5] The Ryukyuan languages are notmutually intelligible with Japanese—indeed, Ryukyuan languages are largely not mutually intelligible with each other—and thus are usually considered separate languages.[4] However, for socio-political and ideological reasons, they have often been classified within Japan as dialects of Japanese.[4] Since the beginning ofWorld War II, most mainland Japanese have regarded the Ryukyuan languages as a dialect or group of dialects of Japanese.
The Okinawan language is only 71% lexically similar to, or cognate with, standard Japanese. Even the southernmost Japanese dialect (Kagoshima dialect) is only 72% cognate with the northernmost Ryukyuan language (Amami). The Kagoshima dialect of Japanese, however, is 80% lexically similar to Standard Japanese.[6] There is general agreement among linguistics experts that Ryukyuan varieties can be divided into six languages, conservatively,[7] with dialects unique to islands within each group also sometimes considered languages.
A widely accepted hypothesis among linguists categorizes the Ryukyuan languages into two groups, Northern Ryukyuan (Amami–Okinawa) and Southern Ryukyuan (Miyako–Yaeyama).[5][8] Many speakers of the Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni languages may also be familiar with Okinawan since Okinawan has the most speakers and once acted as the regional standard. Speakers of Yonaguni are also likely to know the Yaeyama language due to its proximity. Since Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni are less urbanized than the Okinawan mainland, their languages are not declining as quickly as that of Okinawa proper, and some children continue to be brought up in these languages.[citation needed]
Each Ryukyuan language is generally unintelligible to others in the same family. There is wide diversity among them. For example, Yonaguni has only three vowels, whereas varieties of Amami may have up to seven, excluding length distinctions. The table below illustrates the different phrases used in each language for "thank you" and "welcome", with standard Japanese provided for comparison.
A market sign in Naha, written in Okinawan (red) and Japanese (blue)
There is no census data for the Ryukyuan languages, and the number of speakers is unknown.[8] As of 2005, the total population of the Ryukyu region was 1,452,288, but fluent speakers are restricted to the older generation, generally in their 50s or older, and thus the true number of Ryukyuan speakers is likely much lower.[8]
Starting in the 1890s, the Japanese government began to suppress the Ryukyuan languages as part of their policy of forced assimilation in the islands.
Children being raised in the Ryukyuan languages are becoming increasingly rare throughout the islands, and usually occurs only when the children are living with their grandparents. The Ryukyuan languages are still used in traditional cultural activities, such asfolk music,folk dance,poem and folk plays. There has also been a radio news program in the Naha dialect since 1960.[13]
Circa 2007, inOkinawa, people under the age of 40 have little proficiency in the nativeOkinawan language.[14] A newmixed language, based on Japanese and Okinawan, has developed, known as "Okinawan Japanese". Although it has been largely ignored by linguists and language activists, this is the language of choice among the younger generation.[15]
Similarly, the common language now used in everyday conversations inAmami Ōshima is not the traditionalAmami language, but rather a regional variation of Amami-accented Japanese, known asAmami Japanese. It is locally known asトン普通語 (Ton Futsūgo, literally meaning "potato [i.e. rustic] common language").[16][17]
To try to preserve the language, the Okinawan Prefectural government proclaimed on March 31, 2006, that September 18 would be commemorated asShimakutuba no Hi "Island Languages Day" (しまくとぅばの日),[18] as the day's numerals ingoroawase spell outku (9),tu (10),ba (8);kutuba is one of the few words common throughout the Ryukyuan languages meaning "word" or "language" (a cognate of the Japanese wordkotoba (言葉, "word")). A similar commemoration is held in the Amami region on February 18 beginning in 2007, proclaimed asHōgen no Hi (方言の日, "Dialect Day") byŌshima Subprefecture inKagoshima Prefecture. Each island has its own name for the event:
Amami Ōshima:Shimayumuta no Hi (シマユムタの日) orShimakutuba no Hi (シマクトゥバの日) (also written島口の日)
It is generally accepted that the Ryukyu Islands were populated byProto-Japonic speakers in the first millennium, and since then relative isolation allowed the Ryukyuan languages to diverge significantly from the varieties of Proto-Japonic spoken in Mainland Japan, which would later be known asOld Japanese. However, the discoveries of thePinza-Abu Cave Man, theMinatogawa Man, and theYamashita Cave Man[20] as well as theShiraho Saonetabaru Cave Ruins[21] suggest an earlier arrival to the island by modern humans. Some researchers suggest that the Ryukyuan languages are most likely to have evolved from a "pre-Proto-Japonic language" from the Korean peninsula.[22] However, Ryukyuan may have already begun to diverge from Proto-Japonic before this migration, while its speakers still dwelt inthe main islands of Japan.[8] After this initial settlement, there was little contact between the main islands and the Ryukyu Islands for centuries, allowing Ryukyuan and Japanese to diverge as separate linguistic entities from each other.[23] This situation lasted until theKyushu-basedSatsuma Domain conquered the Ryukyu Islands in the 17th century.[23]
In 1846–1849 first Protestant missionary in RyukyuBernard Jean Bettelheim studied local languages, partially translated the Bible into them and published first grammar of Shuri Ryukyuan.[24]
TheRyukyu Kingdom retained its autonomy until 1879, when it was annexed by Japan.[25] The Japanese government adopted a policy of forced assimilation, appointing mainland Japanese to political posts and suppressing native culture and language.[25] Students caught speaking the Ryukyuan languages were made to wear adialect card (方言札hōgen fuda), a method ofpublic humiliation.[26][note 1] Students who regularly wore the card would receivecorporal punishment.[26] In 1940, there was a political debate amongst Japanese leaders about whether or not to continue the oppression of the Ryukyuan languages, although the argument for assimilation prevailed.[27] In theWorld War II era, speaking the Ryukyuan languages was officially illegal, although in practice the older generation was still monolingual.[26] During theBattle of Okinawa, many Okinawans were labeled as spies and executed for speaking the Okinawan language.[28] This policy oflinguicide lasted into thepost-war occupation of the Ryukyu Islands by theUnited States.[26] As the American occupation forces generally promoted the reforming of a separate Ryukyuan culture, many Okinawan officials continued to strive for Japanification as a form of defiance.
Older Ryukyuan texts are often found on stone inscriptions.Tamaudun-no-Hinomon (玉陵の碑文 "Inscription ofTamaudun tomb") (1501), for example. Within theRyukyu Kingdom, official texts were written inkanji andhiragana, derived from Japan. However, this was a sharp contrast from Japan at the time, whereclassical Chinese writing was mostly used for official texts, only using hiragana for informal ones. Classical Chinese writing was sometimes used in Ryukyu as well, read inkundoku (Ryukyuan) or in Chinese. In Ryukyu,katakana was hardly used.
Historically, official documents in Ryukyuan were primarily written in Japanese Epistolary style (候文) withHentaigana. However, after the Satsuma invasion, Japanese culture was banned as part of the policy of exoticizing Ryukyu, and under the policy ofHanejiŌji Chōshū, documents within Ryukyu also began to be written inclassical Chinese known asKanbun while poetry and songs were often written in the Shuri dialect ofOkinawan.
Chuzan-Dengon-Roku written in 1721 by a Chinese diplomat follows Iroha Order for Okinawan phonetic system.[29]Iroha order is traditional phonetic system used in Japan.
Chinese translation of Okinawan Script (Japanese Hiragana and Katakana）[1]
Commoners did not learn kanji.Omoro Sōshi (1531–1623), a noted Ryukyuan song collection, was mainly written in hiragana. Other than hiragana, they also usedSuzhou numerals (sūchūma すうちゅうま in Okinawan), derived from China. InYonaguni in particular, there was a different writing system, theKaidā glyphs (カイダー字 or カイダーディー).[30][31] Under Japanese influence, all of those numerals became obsolete.
Nowadays, perceived as "dialects", Ryukyuan languages are not often written. When they are,Japanese characters are used in anad hoc manner. There are no standard orthographies for the modern languages. Sounds not distinguished in the Japanese writing system, such asglottal stops, are not properly written. Sometimes localkun'yomi are given to kanji, such asagari (あがり "east") for東,iri (いり "west") for西, thus 西表 isIriomote.
Okinawa Prefectural government set up the investigative commission for orthography ofshimakutuba (しまくとぅば正書法検討委員会,Shimakutuba seishohō kentō iinkai) in 2018, and the commission proposed an unified spelling rule based on katakana for languages of Kunigami, Okinawa, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni on May 30, 2022.[32]
A compilation of ancient poems and songs fromOkinawa and theAmami Islands, collected into 22 volumes and written primarily inhiragana with some simplekanji. TheOmoro Sōshi was first compiled in 1531.
More than 80% of the words used in Omoro are common with theYamato language and were used in the Muromachi period.[33] This usage of language Indicates that the people who carried Omoro poems were those who migrated south fromYamato to Okinawa in the lateHeian toMuromachi periods.[34]
Ryukyuan languages often share many phonological features with Japanese, including a voicing opposition forobstruents, CV(C) syllable structure,moraic rhythm, andpitch accent. However, many individual Ryukyuan languages diverge significantly from this pan-Japonic base. For instance, Ōgami does not have phonemic voicing in obstruents, allows CCVC syllables, and has unusual syllabic consonants such as/kff/[kf̩ː] "make".[23]
The Northern Ryukyuan (Amami-Okinawa) languages are notable for havingglottalic consonants.[35] Phonemically these are analyzed of consisting of a cluster/ʔ/ + C, where the consonant/ʔ/ consists of its own mora. For instance, in the Amami dialect Yuwan the word/ʔma/[ˀma] "horse" is bimoraic. Tsuken (Central Okinawan) restricts glottalization to glides and the vowels/ai/. Southern Ryukyuan mostly has little to no glottalization, with some exceptions (e.g. Yonaguni). For instance, the Irabu dialect of the Miyako language only allows glottalization with/t/ and/c/:/ttjaa/[ˀtʲaː] "then",/ccir/[ˀtɕiɭ] "pipe".[35]
Southern Ryukyuan stands out in having a number of syllabic consonants. These consonants are contextually nucleic, becoming syllabic when not adjacent to a vowel.[35] Examples:
Irabu Miyako:
/nam/[nam] "wave"
/mna/[mna] "shell"
/mm/[mː] "potato"
/pžtu/[ps̩tu] "man"
/prrma/[pɭːma] "daytime"
Ōgami Miyako
/us/[us] "cow"
/ss/[sː] "dust"
/kss/[ksː] "breast"
Ōgami even shows a three-way length distinction in fricatives, though across a syllable boundary:[36]
/fɑɑ/[fɑː] "child"
/f.fɑ/[fːɑ] "grass"
/ff.fɑ/[fːːɑ] "comb", "top"
Ikema (a Miyako dialect) has a voiceless moraic nasal phoneme/n̥/, which always precedes another nasal onset and assimilates its place of articulation to the following nasal.[37]
The Ryukyuan languages operate based on themora.[38] Most Ryukyuan languages require words to be at least bimoraic, thus for example in Hateruma the underlying noun root/si/ "hand" becomes/siː/ when it is an independent noun, though it remains as/si/ when attached to a clitic, e.g./si=nu/.[38][note 2] However, thesyllable may still sometimes be relevant—for instance, the Ōgami topic marker takes a different form after open syllables with short vowels:[39]
"staff"/pɑu+=ɑ/ →/pɑu=iɑ/
"vegetable"/suu+=ɑ/ →/suu=iɑ/
"person"/pstu+=ɑ/ →/pstɑ=ɑ/
Ryukyuan languages typically have apitch accent system where some mora in a word bears the pitch accent. They commonly either have two or three distinctive types of pitch accent which may be applied. The category offoot also has relevance to the accentual systems of some Ryukyuan languages, and some Miyako varieties have a cross-linguistically rare system of tonal foot. However, Irabu Miyakoan does not have lexical accent.[40]
The Ryukyuan languages consistently distinguish between theword classes of nouns and verbs, distinguished by the fact that verbs takeinflectional morphology.[41] Property-concept (adjectival) words are generallybound morphemes.[42] One strategy they use is compounding with a free-standing noun:[42]
Miyako is unique in having stand-alone adjectives.[42] These may be formed by reduplication of the root, e.g. Irabu Miyakoimi- "small" →imii-imi "small (adj.)".[44] They may also be compounded with a grammaticalized nounmunu "thing", e.g. Irabuimi-munu 'small (thing)'.[42]
In many Ryukyuan languages, the nominative and genitive are marked identically, a system also found, for example, inAustronesian languages.[45] However, Ryukyuan has the unusual feature that these markers vary based on ananimacy hierarchy.[41] Typically there are two markers of the form=ga and=nu, which are distinguished based on animacy and definiteness. In Yuwan Amami, for instance, the nominative is marked with=ga /=nu and the genitive by=ga /=nu /=Ø based on the following hierarchy:[41]
Yuwan Amami nominative marker
human pronouns
=ga
demonstratives
elder kinship terms
other nouns
=nu
Yuwan Amami genitive marker
human pronouns, adnominal
=ga
demonstratives
human names
=Ø
elder kinship terms
other nouns
=nu
In the Miyako varieties, the object in a dependent clause of clause-chaining constructions has a special marker, homophonous to a topic marker. This might even be interpreted as another function of the topic marker.[41]
Hateruma Yaeyama stands out in that it is azero-marking language, where word order rather than case marking is important:[45]
The Ryukyuan languages mark bothtopic andfocus grammatically. The typical form of the topic marker is =(j)a, or in Southern Ryukyuan=ba; the typical focus marker is=du. In some Ryukyuan languages there are many focus markers with different functions; for instance, Irabu has=du in declarative clauses,=ru in yes-no interrogative clauses, and=ga in wh-interrogative clauses. The focus markers trigger a special verbal inflection—this typologically unusual focus construction, known askakari-musubi, was also found inOld Japanese, but has been lost in Modern Japanese.[44]
While in many Japonic languages this special inflection is often identical to the verbal inflection in relative clauses, in Yuwan Amami is different (the relative inflection is-n / -tan).[46] There is some variation among the Ryukyuan languages as to the form of kakari-musubi—for example, in Irabu Miyako a focus marker blocks a specific verb form, rather than triggering a special inflection.[47]
Thorpe (1983)[48] reconstructs the following pronouns in Proto-Ryukyuan. For the first person, the singular and plural are assumed based on the Yonaguni reflex.
^In fact, in Irabu Miyako lengthening occurs even before a clitic, thus underlying/ti/ "hand" becomes/tiː/ independently and/tiː=nu/ with attached clitic.[38]
^言語学大辞典セレクション：日本列島の言語 (Selection from the Encyclopædia of Linguistics: The Languages of the Japanese Archipelago). "琉球列島の言語" (The Languages of the Ryukyu Islands). 三省堂 1997
^阿部, 美菜子 (2009).沖縄文化はどこから来たか: グスク時代という画期 (叢書・文化学の越境 18) [Where did Okinawan culture come from: The Gusuku period, an epoch of transition (Sosho, Bunkagaku no Kosetsu 18).] (in Japanese). 森話社.ISBN978-4916087966.
^Yuto Niinaga (2010), "Yuwan (Amami Ryukyuan)", in Michinori Shimoji; Thomas Pellard (eds.),An Introduction to Ryukyuan Languages(PDF), Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, p. 55,ISBN9784863370722
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Shimabukuro, Moriyo (2007).The accentual history of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages: a reconstruction. Languages of Asia series. Vol. 2. Folkestone, Kent:Global Oriental.ISBN978-1-901903-63-8.
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