15 Facts About Okinawan language

Okinawan language or Central Okinawan, is a Northern Ryukyuan language spoken primarily in the southern half of the island of Okinawa, as well as in the surrounding islands of Kerama, Kumejima, Tonaki, Aguni and a number of smaller peripheral islands.

Okinawan language is still kept alive in popular music, tourist shows and in theaters featuring a local drama called, which depict local customs and manners.

The education system was the heart of Japanization, where Okinawan children were taught Japanese and punished for speaking their native language, being told that their language was just a "dialect".

Okinawan language is still spoken by communities of Okinawan immigrants in Brazil.

Once in a new country and far from their homeland, they found themselves in a place where there was no prohibition of their Okinawan language, allowing them to willingly speak, celebrate and preserve their speech and culture, up to the present day.

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Since the creation of Okinawa Prefecture, Okinawan language has been labeled a dialect of Japanese as part of a policy of assimilation.

The present-day official stance of the Japanese government remains that Okinawan language is a dialect, and it is common within the Japanese population for it to be called ???? or ???, which means "Okinawa dialect ".

The policy of assimilation, coupled with increased interaction between Japan and Okinawa through media and economics, has led to the development of Okinawan Japanese, which is a dialect of Japanese influenced by the Okinawan and Kunigami languages.

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.

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.

Okinawan language was historically written using an admixture of kanji and hiragana.

The oldest inscription of Okinawan language exemplifying its use along with Hiragana can be found on a stone stele at the Tamaudun mausoleum, dating back to 1501.

Since then, Japanese and American scholars have variously transcribed the regional Okinawan 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 with kanji.

Okinawan language follows a subject–object–verb word order and makes large use of particles as in Japanese.