Okinawan language

Classification

Okinawan is sometimes grouped with Kunigami as the Okinawan languages; however, not all linguists accept this grouping, some claiming that Kunigami is a dialect of Okinawan. Okinawan is also grouped with Amami (or the Amami languages) as the Northern Ryukyuan languages.

Dialect or language

There is ongoing debate over whether the Ryukyuan languages should be regarded as dialects of Japanese or as independent languages. Mutual intelligibility between Okinawan and Standard Japanese is often difficult, and this has been cited as grounds for considering Ryukyuan an independent language. On the other hand, it has also been pointed out that linguistic differences between regions and social classes within Japan were historically extremely large, and that mutual unintelligibility alone cannot serve as a definitive criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

During the Edo period, regional linguistic variation is said to have been even greater than it is today. In the first volume of Shikitei Sanba's Kyōgen Inaka Ayatsuri (1811), it is stated that speech would already differ only 20 chō (about 2 kilometers) outside Edo, and that at a distance of one ri (about 3.9 kilometers), the language would become entirely different from that of Edo. In addition, linguistic differences existed not only between regions but also between social classes, such as the speech of the Yamanote elite, court nobles, and the downtown commoners. Interpreters were reportedly not uncommon between regions. For this reason, there are limits to using "whether people can understand one another" as an absolute criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

Within Japanese and Okinawan linguistics, several terms have been used to refer to the speech of Okinawa, including "Ryukyuan language," "Ryukyuan dialect," and "Okinawan dialect." At present, the term "dialect" is the more commonly used designation. Consequently, the term "Ryukyuan language" is not necessarily familiar to the general public. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure stated that "it is difficult to determine where the difference between a language and a dialect lies. Even a dialect may be called a language if literature is written in it." Likewise, the linguist Katsuhiko Tanaka argued that whether a form of speech is considered an independent language or a dialect subordinate to another language is determined by the political circumstances and aspirations of its speakers, and cannot be decided unequivocally through natural-scientific objectivism.

The Ryukyus possess an indigenous literary tradition, including works such as the Omoro Sōshi, and from this perspective there are positions that regard Ryukyuan as an independent language. On the other hand, the peoples of Japan and Okinawa shared the Jōmon cultural sphere in ancient times, are believed to possess a common ancestral language and genetic connections, and Okinawa has historically been incorporated into the Japanese state for more than 500 years since the medieval period. Furthermore, within Okinawan society itself, the recognition of these speech forms as "dialects" is widespread. For these reasons, many researchers continue to use the term "Okinawan dialect."

Thus, whether Ryukyuan should be classified as a "language" or a "dialect" is not merely a linguistic question, but one deeply connected to history, politics, culture, and identity.

Dialects of the Ryukyuan language

Okinawan linguist Seizen Nakasone states that the Ryukyuan languages are in fact groupings of similar dialects. As each community has its own distinct dialect, there is no "one language". Nakasone attributes this diversity to the isolation caused by immobility, citing the story of his mother who wanted to visit the town of Nago but never made the 25km trip before she died of old age.

The contemporary dialects in Ryukyuan language are divided into three large groups: Amami-Okinawa dialects, Miyako-Yaeyama dialects, and the Yonaguni dialect. All of them are mutually unintelligible. Amami is located in the Kagoshima prefecture but it belongs to the Ryukyuan group linguistically. The Yonaguni dialect is very different in phonetics from the other groups but it comes closest to the Yaeyama dialect lexically.

Sociolinguistics

UNESCO listed six Okinawan language varieties as endangered languages in 2009. The endangerment of Okinawan is largely due to the shift to Standard Japanese. Throughout history, Okinawan languages have been treated as dialects of Standard Japanese. For instance, in the 20th century, many schools used "dialect tags" to punish the students who spoke in Okinawan. Consequently, many of the remaining speakers today are choosing not to transmit their languages to younger generations due to the stigmatization of the languages in the past.

There have been several revitalization efforts made to reverse this language shift. However, Okinawan is still poorly taught in formal institutions due to the lack of support from the Okinawan Education Council: education in Okinawa is conducted exclusively in Japanese, and children do not study Okinawan as their second language at school. As a result, at least two generations of Okinawans have grown up without any proficiency in their local languages both at home and school.

Okinawan language is 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 74% lexically similar to Standard Japanese.

Phonology

Vowels

The Okinawan language has five vowels, all of which may be long or short, though the short vowels and are quite rare, as they occur only in a few native Okinawan words with heavy syllables with the pattern or , such as mensōrē "welcome" and tonfā. The close back vowels and are truly rounded, rather than the compressed vowels of standard Japanese.

Pitch accent

Pitch accent varies greatly between dialects. In Shuri dialect, there are two word tones, which are lexically determined: flat (accentless) and falling (accented). The scope of the accent is the word plus an attached grammatical particle. Accentless words are high tone throughout, whereas accented words have a drop in pitch after the second mora (or after the first in bimoraic words).

The difference can be illustrated with:

• 'flower', nominative
• 'nose', nominative

and

• 'fire', nominative
• 'day', nominative

Consonants

The Okinawan language counts some 20 distinctive segments shown in the chart below, with major allophones presented in parentheses.

The only consonant that can occur as a syllable coda is the archiphoneme . Many analyses treat it as an additional phoneme , the moraic nasal, though it never contrasts with or .

The consonant system of the Okinawan language is fairly similar to that of standard Japanese, but it does present a few differences on the phonemic and allophonic level. Namely, Okinawan retains the labialized consonants and which were lost in Late Middle Japanese (though they are retained in a handful of Modern Japanese dialects), possesses a glottal stop , features a voiceless bilabial fricative distinct from the aspirate , and has two distinctive affricates which arose from a number of different sound processes. Additionally, Okinawan lacks the major allophones and found in Japanese, having historically fronted the vowel to after the alveolars , consequently merging tsu into chi, su into shi, and both dzu and zu into ji. It also lacks as a distinctive phoneme, having merged it into .

Bilabial and glottal fricatives

The bilabial fricative has sometimes been transcribed as the cluster , since, like Japanese, allophonically labializes into before the high vowel , and does not occur before the rounded vowel . This suggests that an overlap between and exists, and so the contrast in front of other vowels can be denoted through labialization. However, this analysis fails to take account of the fact that Okinawan has not fully undergone the diachronic change → → as in Japanese, and that the suggested clusterization and labialization into is unmotivated. Consequently, the existence of must be regarded as independent of , even though the two overlap. Barring a few words that resulted from the former change, the aspirate also arose from the odd lenition of and , as well as words loaned from other dialects. Before the glide and the high vowel , it is pronounced closer to , as in Japanese.

Palatalization

The plosive consonants and historically palatalized and affricated into before and occasionally following the glide and the high vowel : → chiri "fog", and → chura- "beautiful". This change preceded vowel raising, so that instances where arose from did not trigger palatalization: → kī "hair". Their voiced counterparts and underwent the same effect, becoming under such conditions: → qnnaji "eel", and → nukujiri "saw"; but → kagin "seasoning".

Both and may or may not also allophonically affricate before the mid vowel , though this pronunciation is increasingly rare. Similarly, the fricative consonant palatalizes into before the glide and the vowel , including when historically derives from : → shikē "world". It may also palatalize before the vowel , especially so in the context of topicalization: dushi → dusē or dushē "(topic) friend".

In general, sequences containing the palatal consonant are relatively rare and tend to exhibit depalatalization. For example, tends to merge with ( myāku → nāku "Miyako"); has merged into and ( → rū ~ dū "dragon"); and has mostly become ( shui → sui "Shuri").

Flapping and fortition

The voiced plosive and the flap tend to merge, with the first becoming a flap in word-medial position, and the second sometimes becoming a plosive in word-initial position. For example, rū "dragon" may be strengthened into dū, and hashidu "door" conversely flaps into hashiru. The two sounds do, however, still remain distinct in a number of words and verbal constructions.

Glottal stop

Okinawan also features a distinctive glottal stop that historically arose from a process of glottalization of word-initial vowels. Hence, all vowels in Okinawan are predictably glottalized at the beginning of words ( → ami "rain"), save for a few exceptions. High vowel loss or assimilation following this process created a contrast with glottalized approximants and nasal consonants. Compare → qwa "pig" to wa "I", or → qnni "rice plant" to → nni "chest".

Moraic nasal

The moraic nasal has been posited in most descriptions of Okinawan phonology. Like Japanese, (transcribed using the small capital ) occupies a full mora and its precise place of articulation will vary depending on the following consonant. Before other labial consonants, it will be pronounced closer to a syllabic bilabial nasal , as in qnma "horse". Before velar and labiovelar consonants, it will be pronounced as a syllabic velar nasal , as in bingata, a method of dying clothes. And before alveolar and alveolo-palatal consonants, it becomes a syllabic alveolar nasal , as in kanda "vine". In some varieties, it instead becomes a syllabic uvular nasal . Elsewhere, its exact realization remains unspecified, and it may vary depending on the first sound of the next word or morpheme. In isolation and at the end of utterances, it is realized as a velar nasal .

Correspondences with Japanese

Orthography

The Okinawan language was historically written using an admixture of kanji and hiragana. The traditional script of Okinawa is called 古文書. Before the Satsuma Invasion in 1609, Man'yōgana (万葉仮名) was used like in Japanese. The hiragana syllabary is believed to have first been introduced from mainland Japan to the Ryukyu Kingdom some time during the reign of king Shunten in the early thirteenth century. It is likely that Okinawans were already in contact with hanzi (Chinese characters) due to extensive trade between the Ryukyu Kingdom and China, Japan and Korea. However, hiragana gained more widespread acceptance throughout the Ryukyu Islands, and most documents and letters were exclusively transcribed using this script, in contrast to in Japan where writing solely in hiragana was considered "women's script". The Omoro Sōshi (おもろさうし), a sixteenth-century compilation of songs and poetry, and a few preserved writs of appointments dating from the same century were written solely in Hiragana. Kanji were gradually adopted due to the growing influence of mainland Japan and to the linguistic affinity between the Okinawan and Japanese languages. However, it was mainly limited to affairs of high importance and to documents sent towards the mainland. The oldest inscription of Okinawan exemplifying its use along with Hiragana can be found on a stone stele at the Tamaudun mausoleum, dating back to 1501.

After the invasion of Okinawa by the Shimazu clan of Satsuma in 1609, Okinawan ceased to be used in official affairs. It was replaced by standard Japanese writing and a form of Classical Chinese writing known as kanbun. Despite this change, Okinawan still continued to prosper in local literature up until the nineteenth century. Following the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government abolished the domain system and formally annexed the Ryukyu Islands to Japan as the Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. To promote national unity, the government then introduced standard education and opened Japanese-language schools based on the Tokyo dialect. Students were discouraged and chastised for speaking or even writing in the local "dialect", notably through the use of "dialect cards" (方言札). As a result, Okinawan gradually ceased to be written entirely until the American takeover in 1945.

Since then, Japanese and American scholars have variously transcribed the regional language using a number of ad hoc romanization schemes or the katakana syllabary to demarcate its foreign nature with standard Japanese. Proponents of Okinawan tend to be more traditionalist and continue to write the language using hiragana and kanji. In any case, no standard or consensus concerning spelling issues has ever been formalized, so discrepancies between modern literary works are common.

Tana family documents (田名家文書), which are letters of rank appointment issued by the Shuri Royal Government, are written in 候文(Japanese Epistolary style). However, after the Satsuma invasion, Japanese culture was banned as part of the policy of exoticizing Ryukyu, and under the policy of Haneji Ōji Chōshū, documents within Ryukyu also began to be written in classical Chinese.

Comparison of official documents of Tana family documents in 1523 and 1647.

Syllabary

Technically, they are not syllables, but rather morae. Each mora in Okinawan consists of one or two kana characters. If there are two, then the first kana is followed by a smaller version of the second kana. In each cell of the table below, the top row is the kana (hiragana to the left, katakana to the right of the dot), the middle row in rōmaji (Hepburn romanization), and the bottom row in IPA.

Grammar

Okinawan follows a subject–object–verb word order and makes large use of particles as in Japanese. Okinawan retains a number of Japonic grammatical features also found in Old Japanese but lost (or highly restricted) in Modern Japanese, such as a distinction between the terminal form (終止形) and the attributive form (連体形), the genitive function of が ga (lost in the Shuri dialect), the nominative function of ぬ nu (cf. Japanese: の no), as well as honorific/plain distribution of ga and nu in nominative use.

One etymology given for the -un and -uru endings is the continuative form suffixed with uri ("to be; to exist", cf. Classical Japanese: 居り wori): -un developed from the terminal form uri; -uru developed from the attributive form uru, i.e.:

• kachuru derives from kachi-uru;
• kachun derives from kachi-uri; and
• yumun ("to read", cf. Japanese: 読む yomu) derives from yumi + uri.

A similar etymology is given for the terminal -san and attributive -saru endings for adjectives: the stem suffixed with さ sa (nominalises adjectives, i.e. high → height, hot → heat), suffixed with ari ("to be; to exist; to have", cf. Classical Japanese: 有り ari), i.e.:

• takasan ("high; tall", cf. Japanese: 高い takai) derives from taka-sa-ari;
• achisan ("hot; warm", cf. Japanese: 暑い atsui) derives from atsu-sa-ari; and
• yutasaru ("good; pleasant", cf. Japanese: 豊かな yutakana "abundant; plentiful") derives from yuta-sa-aru.

Parts of speech

Nouns (名詞)

Nouns are classified as independent, non-conjugating part of speech that can become a subject of a sentence

Pronouns (代名詞)

Pronouns are classified the same as nouns, except that pronouns are more broad.

Adverbs (副詞)

Adverbs are classified as an independent, non-conjugating part of speech that cannot become a subject of a sentence and modifies a declinable word (用言; verbs, adverbs, adjectives) that comes after the adverb. There are two main categories to adverbs and several subcategories within each category, as shown in the table below.

Prenominal adjectives (連体詞)

Conjunctions (接続詞)

Interjections and exclamations (感動詞)

Verbs (動詞)

Verbs are classified as an independent, conjugating part of speech that shows movements. The conclusive form ends in ん (n).

Adjectives (形容詞)

Adjectives are classified as an independent, conjugating part of speech that shows property or state. The conclusive form ends in さん (san).

(存在動詞)

存在動詞 are classified as an independent, conjugating part of speech that shows existence or decision of a certain thing. やん (yan) attaches to a substantive.

Adjectival verbs (形容動詞)

Adjectival verbs are classified as an independent, conjugating part of speech that shows the state of existence of events. やん (yan) attaches to words that shows state.

Auxiliary verbs (助動詞)

Particles (助詞)

Prefixes (接頭語)

Suffixes (接尾語)

Others

Copula

Question words (疑問詞)

Syntax

The basic word order is subject–object–verb.

Okinawan is a marked nominative language (with the accusative being unmarked) that also shows minor active–stative variation in intransitive verbs relating to existence or emergence. In existence or emergence verbs, the subject may be optionally unmarked (except for pronouns and proper names, which must be marked with ga), and marked human subjects cannot use ga anymore, but rather always with the often-inanimate marker nu.

Example

Sample text in Standard Okinawan (Shuri-Naha dialect)

In Kanji

人間ー誰ん生まりやぎーなー自由やい、また、胴大切に思ゆる肝とぅ胴守らんでぃる肝ー、誰やてぃんゆぬ如授かとーるむんやん。人間ー元からいー矩ぬ備わとーくとぅ、互ーに兄弟やんでぃる考ーさーに事に当たらんだれーならん。(without ruby characters)

人間（にんじの）ー誰（たー）ん生（ん）まりやぎーなー自由（じゆ）やい、また、胴（どぅー）大切（てーしち）に思（うむ）ゆる肝（ちむ）とぅ胴（どぅー）守（まむ）らんでぃる肝（ちも）ー、誰（たー）やてぃんゆぬ如（ぐとぅ）授（さじゃ）かとーるむんやん。人間（にんじの）ー元（むーとぅ）からいー矩（かに）ぬ備（すな）わとーくとぅ、互（たげ）ーに兄弟（ちょーでー）やんでぃる考（かんげ）ーさーに事（くとぅ）に当（あ）たらんだれーならん。(with ruby characters)

Transliteration

Ninjinoo taa n 'nmariyagiinaa jiyu yai, mata, duu teeshichi ni umuyuru chimu tu duu mamurandiru chimoo, taa yatin yunugutu sajakatooru mun yan. Ninjinoo muutu kara iika ni nu sunawatookutu, tagee ni choodeeyandiru kangeesaa ni kutu ni atarandaree naran. (UDHR Article 1)