Ebook: Why it is important to study the Ryukyuan languages. The example of Ogami Ryukyuan

Oxford University, 2009. — 95 p.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.