16 Facts About Ryukyuan languages

Ryukyuan languages are generally SOV, dependent-marking, modifier-head, nominative-accusative languages, like Japanese.

The Ryukyuan languages are not mutually intelligible with Japanese—in fact, they are not even mutually intelligible with each other—and thus are usually considered separate languages.

Since Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni are less urbanized than the Okinawan mainland, their Ryukyuan languages are not declining as quickly as that of Okinawa proper, and some children continue to be brought up in these Ryukyuan languages.

Each Ryukyuan languages language is generally unintelligible to others in the same family.

Six Ryukyuan languages are listed in the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Related searches

Children being raised in the Ryukyuan languages are becoming increasingly rare throughout the islands, and usually only occurs when the children are living with their grandparents.

The Ryukyuan languages are still used in traditional cultural activities, such as folk music, folk dance, poem and folk plays.

Some researchers suggest that the Ryukyuan languages are most likely to have evolved from a "pre-Proto-Japonic language" from the Korean peninsula.

Students caught speaking the Ryukyuan languages were made to wear a dialect card, a method of public humiliation.

Nowadays, in favor of multiculturalism, preserving Ryukyuan languages has become the policy of Okinawa Prefectural government, as well as the government of Kagoshima Prefecture's Oshima Subprefecture.

Ryukyuan languages are spoken on the Ryukyu Islands, which comprise the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago There are four major island groups which make up the Ryukyu Islands: the Amami Islands, the Okinawa Islands, the Miyako Islands, and the Yaeyama Islands.

Southern Ryukyuan languages stands out in having a number of syllabic consonants.

Ryukyuan languages typically have a pitch accent system where some mora in a word bears the pitch accent.

Ryukyuan languages consistently distinguish between the word classes of nouns and verbs, distinguished by the fact that verbs take inflectional morphology.

However, Ryukyuan languages has the unusual feature that these markers vary based on an animacy hierarchy.

In some Ryukyuan languages there are many focus markers with different functions; for instance, Irabu has =du in declarative clauses, =ru in yes-no interrogative clauses, and =ga in wh-interrogative clauses.