The form one of two branches of the

Ryukyuan languages The , also Lewchewan or Luchuan (), are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Along with the Japanese language and the Hachijō language, they make up the Japonic language family. Ju ...

. They are spoken on the

Sakishima Islands The (or 先島群島, ''Sakishima-guntō'') (Okinawan language, Okinawan: ''Sachishima'', Miyakoan language, Miyako: ''Saksїzїma'', Yaeyama language, Yaeyama: ''Sakїzїma'', Yonaguni language, Yonaguni: ''Satichima'') are an archipelago loca ...

Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan. It consists of three main island groups—the Okinawa Islands, the Sakishima Islands, and the Daitō Islands—spread across a maritime zone approximately 1,000 kilometers east to west an ...

. The three languages are Miyako (on the Miyako Islands) and Yaeyama and

Yonaguni , one of the Yaeyama Islands, is the westernmost island of Japan, lying from the east coast of Taiwan, between the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea. The island is administered as the Towns of Japan, town of Yonaguni, Okinawa, Yonaguni, Ya ...

(on the

Yaeyama Islands The Yaeyama Islands (八重山列島 ''Yaeyama-rettō'', also 八重山諸島 ''Yaeyama-shotō'', Yaeyama: ''Yaima'', Yonaguni: ''Daama'', Okinawan: ''Yeema'', Northern Ryukyuan: ''Yapema'') are an archipelago in the southwest of Okinawa Pref ...

, of the Macro-Yaeyama subgroup). The Macro-Yaeyama languages have been identified as "critically endangered" by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

and Miyako as "definitely endangered". All Ryukyuan languages are officially labeled as

dialects A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or iso ...

of Japanese by the Japanese government despite mutual unintelligibility. While the majority of Ryukyuan languages have used Chinese or

Japanese script The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese w ...

for writing, the Yaeyama Islands never had a full-featured writing system. Islanders developed the

Kaidā glyphs are a set of pictograms once used in the Yaeyama Islands of southwestern Japan. The word ''kaidā'' was taken from Yonaguni, and most studies on the pictographs focused on Yonaguni Island. However, there is evidence for their use in Yaeyama's ...

as a simple method to record family names, items, and numerals to aid in tax

accounting Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the process of recording and processing information about economic entity, economic entities, such as businesses and corporations. Accounting measures the results of an organization's economic activit ...

. This system was used until the 19th century introduction of Japanese-language education. Even today, communication in the Yaeyama or Yonaguni languages is almost exclusively oral, and written communication is done in Japanese.

Reconstruction

Proto-Sakishima, the

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...

ancestral to the Southern Ryukyuan languages, has been reconstructed by Bentley (2008).Bentley, John R. 2008.
A Linguistic History of the Forgotten Islands: A Reconstruction of the Proto-language of the Southern Ryūkyūs
'. Leiden: Brill.

References

{{Japonic languages Languages of Japan Ryukyuan languages Ryukyu Islands Culture in Okinawa Prefecture