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. ...

. They are spoken on the

Sakishima Islands The (or 先島群島, ''Sakishima-guntō'') ( Okinawan: ''Sachishima'', Miyako: ''Saksїzїma'', Yaeyama: ''Sakїzїma'', Yonaguni: ''Satichima'') are an archipelago located at the southernmost end of the Japanese Archipelago. They are part ...

Okinawa Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan. Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan, has a population of 1,457,162 (as of 2 February 2020) and a geographic area of 2,281 km2 (880 sq mi). Naha is the capital and largest cit ...

. The three languages are Miyako (on the

Miyako Islands The (also Miyako Jima group) are a group of islands in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, belonging to the Ryukyu Islands. They are situated between the Okinawa Island and Yaeyama Islands. In the early 1870s, the population of the islands was esti ...

) and Yaeyama and

Yonaguni , one of the Yaeyama Islands, is the westernmost inhabited island of Japan, lying from the east coast of Taiwan, between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean proper. The island is administered as the town of Yonaguni, Yaeyama Gun, O ...

(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 P ...

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

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international coope ...

and Miyako as "definitely endangered". All Ryukyuan languages are officially labeled as dialects of Japanese by the Japanese government despite

mutual unintelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...

. 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 naturalised Japanes ...

for writing, the Yaeyama Islands never had a full-featured writing system. Islanders developed the Kaidā glyphs as a simple method to record family names, items, and numerals to aid in tax

accounting Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non financial information about economic entities such as businesses and corporations. Accounting, which has been called the "languag ...

. 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 unattes ...

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