The Yonaguni language ( ''Dunan Munui'') is a Southern Ryukyuan language spoken by around 400 people on the island of

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 ...

, in the

Ryukyu Islands The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan: the Ōsumi, Tokara, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima Islands (further divided into the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands), with Yon ...

, the westernmost of the chain lying just east of

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

. It is most closely related to Yaeyama. Due to the Japanese policy on languages, the language is not recognized by the government, which instead calls it the . As classified 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 ...

, the Yonaguni language is one of the most endangered languages in all of Japan, after the

Ainu language Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...

Phonology

Vowels

The table below shows the

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

s present in the Yonaguni language. Vowels which are only

allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ' ...

appear in parentheses. : can also probably be recognized as an independent phoneme and not just as an allophone of . However, its distribution is very limited. Excluding a few interjections, the only morpheme in which it appears is the sentence-final, exclamatory particle ''do''.

Consonants

The table below shows the

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...

s present in the Yonaguni language. Consonants which are only

appear in parentheses. Plosive and affricate

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s have three-way contrast between fortis, lenis, and voiced consonants.

Phonological cognates

As a Southern Ryukyuan language, Yonaguni, similar to Miyako and Yaeyama, has in place with

Standard Japanese is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been m ...

, such as Yonaguni ('stomach, belly'), cognate with Japanese ('guts, bowels'). Yonaguni also has where Japanese and other Ryukyuan languages have (orthographically ''y''). Thus, for example, Yonaguni ('mountain') is cognate with Japanese and Yaeyama ('id.'). Yonaguni is probably a recent development from an earlier , however, judging from the fact that even the in loanwords of Sinitic origin is pronounced by speakers of the Yonaguni language, such as ''dasai'' 'vegetables' from Middle Chinese (). An entry in the late-15th-century Korean annals ''Seongjong Taewang Sillok'' records the local name of the island of Yonaguni in

Idu script Idu (이두, hanja : , meaning ''official's reading'') is an archaic writing system that represents the Korean language using hanja. The script, which was developed by Buddhist monks, made it possible to record Korean words through its equ ...

as 閏伊是麼, which has the Middle Korean reading ''zjuni sima'', with ''sima'' glossed in the text as the Japonic word for 'island'. That is direct evidence of an intermediate stage of the fortition - > - > -, leading to the modern name 'Yonaguni'. The Yonaguni language exhibits intervocalic voicing of

plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

s, as do many Japonic languages. It also exhibits the tendency for , especially when intervocalic, to be pronounced as a velar nasal , as in Standard Japanese.

Syllable structure

Below is the syllable template for Dunan: :(C (G) ) V₁ (V₂) (N) * C = consonant * G = glide or * V = vowel * N =

moraic nasal A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic'') ...

The

onset Onset may refer to: * Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound * Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States **Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal * Interonset interva ...

allows for a single consonant with the occasional presence of a glide. The

nucleus Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: * Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom *Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucl ...

can contain up to two vowels. The only allowable

coda Coda or CODA may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * Movie coda, a post-credits scene * ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television *''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...

is a moraic nasal.

Writing system

Yonaguni was once written with a unique writing system called Kaidā logograms. However, after conquest by the Ryukyu Kingdom and later annexation by the

Empire of Japan The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent form ...

, the logograms were replaced by Japanese kana and Kanji.

References

External links

* Yonaguni phrasebook on Wikivoyage {{DEFAULTSORT:Yonaguni Language Ryukyuan languages Endangered languages