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 hit up the Japonic language family.

The languages are not mutually intelligible with regarded and mentioned separately. other. this is the not asked how many speakers of these languages remain, but language shift towards the ownership of Standard Japanese in addition to dialects like Okinawan Japanese has resulted in these languages becoming endangered; UNESCO labels four of the languages "definitely endangered" in addition to two others "severely endangered".

History

It is generally accepted that the Ryukyu Islands were populated by Proto-Japonic speakers in the number one millennium, and since then relative isolation enables the Ryukyuan languages to diverge significantly from the varieties of Proto-Japonic spoken in Mainland Japan, which would later be call as Old Japanese. However, the discoveries of the Pinza-Abu Cave Man, the Minatogawa Man, and the Yamashita Cave Man as alive as the Shiraho Saonetabaru Cave Ruinsan earlier arrival to the island by sophisticated humans. Some researchersthat the Ryukyuan languages are nearly likely to form evolved from a "pre-Proto-Japonic language" from the Korean peninsula. However, Ryukyuan may have already begun to diverge from Proto-Japonic previously this migration, while its speakers still dwelt in the leading islands of Japan. After this initial settlement, there was little contact between the leading islands and the Ryukyu Islands for centuries, allowing Ryukyuan and Japanese to diverge as separate linguistic entities from used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other. This situation lasted until the Kyushu-based Satsuma Domain conquered the Ryukyu Islands in the 17th century.

The post-war occupation of the Ryukyu Islands by the United States. As the American occupation forces loosely promoted the reforming of a separate Ryukyuan culture, numerous Okinawan officials continued to strive for Japanification as a form of defiance.

Nowadays, in favor of multiculturalism, preserving Ryukyuan languages has become the policy of Okinawa Prefectural government, as living as the government of Kagoshima Prefecture's Ōshima Subprefecture. However, the situation is non very optimistic, since the vast majority of Okinawan children are now monolingual in Japanese.