The Kunigami or Northern Okinawan language (), is a Ryukyuan language of Northern

Okinawa Island is the largest of the Okinawa Islands and the Ryukyu (''Nansei'') Islands of Japan in the Kyushu region. It is the smallest and least populated of the five main islands of Japan. The island is approximately long, an average wide, and has an ...

in Kunigami District and city of Nago, otherwise known as the

Yanbaru is the Okinawan and Kunigami name given to the forested northern part of Okinawa Island in Japan. Spanning the northern villages of Higashi, Kunigami, and Ōgimi, Yambaru contains some of the last large surviving tracts of subtropical rain ...

region, historically the territory of the kingdom of

Hokuzan , also known as before the 18th century, located in the north of Okinawa Island, was one of three independent political entities which controlled Okinawa in the 14th century during Sanzan period. The political entity was identified as a tiny co ...

. The

Nakijin is a village located in Kunigami District, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. As of 2003, the village has an estimated population of 9,529 and a population density of 239.00 persons per km2. The total area is 39.87 km2. Education The village ope ...

dialect is often considered representative of Kunigami, analogous to the Shuri- Naha dialect of Central Okinawan. The number of fluent native speakers of Kunigami is not known. As a result of Japanese language policy, the younger generation mostly speaks Japanese as their first language.

Location

In addition to the northern portion of Okinawa Island, Kunigami is spoken on the small neighboring islands of Ie, Tsuken and Kudaka.

Scope and classification

''Glottolog'', following Pellard (2009), classifies Kunigami with Central Okinawan as the two

Okinawan languages The Northern Ryukyuan languages are a group of languages spoken in the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture and the Okinawa Islands, Okinawa Prefecture of southwestern Japan. It is one of two primary branches of the Ryukyuan languages, which ar ...

. ''Ethnologue'' adds

Okinoerabu , also known as Okinoerabu, is one of the Satsunan Islands, classed with the Amami archipelago between Kyūshū and Okinawa. The island, 93.63 km² in area, has a population of approximately 14,000 persons. Administratively it is divided into ...

and Yoron; these (along with all other languages of the northern Ryukyu Islands) are classified as Amami languages by ''Glottolog''. The UNESCO ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'', following Uemura (2003), includes Okinoerabu and Yoron as varieties of Kunigami.

Folk terminology

The speakers of Kunigami have various words for "language", "dialect", and "style of speech". For example, linguist Nakasone Seizen (1907–1995) stated that the dialect of his home community Yonamine, Nakijin Village had (corresponding Standard Japanese word forms in parentheses): (''kuchi''), (''kotoba'') and (''monoii''). The language of one's own community was referred to as or . The Yonamine dialect was part of Nakijin's western dialect called . The northern part of Okinawa was colloquially known as Yanbaru and hence its language was sometimes called .

Phonology

Like most Ryukyuan languages north of Central Okinawan, Kunigami has series of so-called "tensed" or "glottalized" consonants. While the nasals and glides are truly glottalized, the stops are tenuis , in contrast to the aspiration of the "plain" stops . Kunigami is also notable for the presence of an phoneme separate from the phoneme that is believed to be the historical source of in most other

Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...

; Kunigami instead has two different sources:

Proto-Japonic Proto-Japonic or Proto-Japanese–Ryukyuan is the reconstructed language ancestral to the Japonic language family. It has been reconstructed by using a combination of internal reconstruction from Old Japanese and by applying the comparative meth ...

or otherwise the zero initial in certain conditioning environments. Thus, for example, the

dialect of Kunigami has (light, a lamp, a

shōji A is a door, window or room divider used in traditional Japanese architecture, consisting of translucent (or transparent) sheets on a lattice frame. Where light transmission is not needed, the similar but opaque ''fusuma'' is used (oshiire/ ...

),Acute accent indicates a high tone which is cognate with Japanese (light, a lamp); the Kunigami form is distinguished from its Japanese cognate by the initial , tenuis , and elision of Proto-Japonic *r before *i. The Kunigami language also makes distinctions in certain word pairs, such as Nakijin dialect (cloud) and (spider), which in Japanese are almost homophonic ( and ).

Morphology

One notable difference in the use of certain morphological markers between Kunigami language and Standard Japanese is the use of the form as an adverb in Kunigami: e.g. Nakijin dialect , which is equivalent to Standard Japanese ''toókú hanárete irú'' ("It is far away"). In Standard Japanese, the form is used adverbially, while the form is used exclusively to derive abstract nouns of quality and amount ("-ness" forms) from adjectival stems.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kunigami Language Ryukyuan languages