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Traffic safety slogan signs in Kin, Okinawa, written in Japanese (center) and Okinawan (left and right).. The Ryukyuan languages (琉球語派, Ryūkyū-goha, also 琉球諸語, Ryūkyū-shogo or 島言葉 in Ryukyuan, Shima kotoba, literally "Island Speech"), also Lewchewan or Luchuan (/ l uː ˈ tʃ uː ə n /), are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the ...
Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan (Japanese: 日琉語族, romanized: Nichiryū gozoku), sometimes also Japanic, [1] is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands.
During the Meiji and post-Meiji period, the Ryukyuan languages were considered to be dialects of Japanese and viewed negatively. They were suppressed by the Japanese government in policies of forced assimilation and into using the standard Japanese language. [139] [140] From 1907, children were prohibited to speak Ryukyuan languages in school ...
Okinawan is a Japonic language, derived from Proto-Japonic and is therefore related to Japanese.The split between Old Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages has been estimated to have occurred as early as the 1st century AD to as late as the 12th century AD.
All Ryukyuan languages are officially labeled as dialects of Japanese by the Japanese government despite mutual unintelligibility. While the majority of Ryukyuan languages have used Chinese or Japanese script for writing, the Yaeyama Islands never had a full-featured writing system.
The Northern Ryukyuan languages, also known as the Amami–Okinawan languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture and the Okinawa Islands, Okinawa Prefecture of southwestern Japan.
Proto-Japonic, Proto-Japanese, or Proto-Japanese–Ryukyuan is the reconstructed language ancestral to the Japonic language family.It has been reconstructed by using a combination of internal reconstruction from Old Japanese and by applying the comparative method to Old Japanese (both the central variety of the Nara area and Eastern Old Japanese dialects) and the Ryukyuan languages. [1]
The dialects (方言, hōgen) of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including modern capital Tokyo) and Western (including old capital Kyoto), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches, the latter perhaps the most divergent of all. [1]