Ryukyuan Languages

The Ryukyuan languages are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Along with the Japanese language, they make up the Japonic language family. Although the Ryukyuan languages have sometimes been considered to be dialects of Japanese, they are not mutually intelligible with Japanese or even with each other. It is not known how many speakers of these languages remain, but language shift towards the use of Standard Japanese and dialects like Okinawan Japanese has resulted in these languages becoming endangered.

The Ryukyu Islands were populated from Mainland Japan in the first millennium CE, and since then relative isolation from the mainland allowed the Ryukyuan languages to diverge significantly from Japanese. Japanese hegemony began to increase in the 17th century, and in 1879 the Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by Japan. The Japanese government imposed a policy of forced assimilation, which continued through the post-World War II occupation of the Ryukyu Islands by the United States. This hastened the abandonment of the Ryukyuan languages by the younger generations, although recently there have been calls for language preservation by the Okinawa Prefectural Government.

Phonologically, the Ryukyuan languages have some cross-linguistically unusual features. Southern Ryukyuan languages have a number of syllabic consonants, including unvoiced syllabic fricatives (e.g. Ōgami Miyako /kss/ 'breast'). Glottalized consonants are common (e.g. Yuwan Amami /ʔma/ 'horse'). Some Ryukyuan languages have phonemic central vowels, e.g. Yuwan Amami /kɨɨ/ 'tree'. Ikema Miyako has a voiceless nasal phoneme /n̥/. Many Ryukyuan languages have contrastive pitch accent.

Ryukyuan languages are generally SOV, dependent-marking, modifier-head, nominative-accusative languages, like the Japanese language. Adjectives are generally bound morphemes, occurring either with noun compounding or using verbalization. Many Ryukyuan languages mark both nominatives and genitives with the same marker. This marker has the unusual feature of changing form depending on an animacy hierarchy. The Ryukyuan languages have topic and focus 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 in Old Japanese, but lost in Modern Japanese.