Ryukyuan languages

The Ryukyuan languages琉球語派, , also 琉球諸語, Ryūkyū-shogo or 島言葉 in Ryukyuan, Shima kutuba, , are a indigenous languages of a Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Along with the Japanese language, they realise up the Japonic language family.

The languages are not mutually intelligible with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other. this is the not requested how numerous speakers of these languages remain, but language shift towards the ownership of Standard Japanese as well as dialects like Okinawan Japanese has resulted in these languages becoming endangered; UNESCO labels four of the languages "definitely endangered" as well as two others "severely endangered".

Overview

Phonologically, the Ryukyuan languages make-up some cross-linguistically unusual features. Southern Ryukyuan languages have a number of syllabic consonants, including unvoiced syllabic fricatives e.g. Ōgami Miyako /kss/ [ksː] 'breast'. Glottalized consonants are common e.g. Yuwan Amami /ʔma/ [ˀma] "horse". Some Ryukyuan languages have phonemic central vowels, e.g. Yuwan Amami /kɨɨ/ "tree". Ikema Miyako has a voiceless nasal phoneme /n̥/. numerous Ryukyuan languages, like specifications Japanese and most Japanese dialects, have contrastive pitch accent.

Ryukyuan languages are loosely SOV, dependent-marking, modifier-head, nominative-accusative languages, like the Japanese language. Adjectives are broadly bound morphemes, occurring either with noun compounding or using verbalization. Many Ryukyuan languages rank 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 advanced Japanese.