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 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 ...

, in the

Ryukyu Islands The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Geography of Taiwan, Taiwan: the Ryukyu Islands are divided into the Satsunan Islands (Ōsumi Islands, Ōsumi, Tokara Islands, Tokara and A ...

, the westernmost of the chain lying just east of

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

. 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 (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 ...

, 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 isola ...

Phonology

Vowels

The table below shows the

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s present in the Yonaguni language. Vowels which are only

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

or marginal appear in parentheses. : can also 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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s present in the Yonaguni language. Plosive and affricate phonemes have three-way contrast. Hirayama et al. (1967) describe the contrast as voiceless non-laryngealized, voiceless laryngealized, and

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...

. Yamada et al. (2015) describe the contrast as

fortis Fortis may refer to: Business * Fortis (Swiss watchmaker), a Swiss watch company * Fortis Films, an American film and television production company founded by actress and producer Sandra Bullock * Fortis Healthcare, a chain of hospitals in ...

(unaspirated and tense), lenis ( weakly aspirated and lax), and voiced. The lenis/fortis distinction neutralized in word-medial positions, both becoming phonetically fortis. In positions other than prevocalic, all nasals are phonetically

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from Latin and ) is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another since they share the bilabial place of ...

with a following consonant (e.g. ng , nd , nb ). Nasals are velar () in final position.

Phonological cognates

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

Standard Japanese is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

, 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 () was a writing system developed during the Three Kingdoms period of Korea (57 BC-668 AD) to write the Korean language using Chinese characters ("hanja"). It used Hanja to represent both native Korean words and grammatical morphemes as we ...

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 The onset allows for a single consonant with the occasional presence of a glide. The nucleus can contain up to two vowels. The only allowable coda 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 The Ryukyu Kingdom was a kingdom in the Ryukyu Islands from 1429 to 1879. It was ruled as a Tributary system of China, tributary state of Ming dynasty, imperial Ming China by the King of Ryukyu, Ryukyuan monarchy, who unified Okinawa Island t ...

and later annexation by the

Empire of Japan The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From Japan–Kor ...

, the logograms were replaced by Japanese kana and Kanji. * /m/ before labial consonants and /ŋ/ before velar consonants. Example ディンブンキルン imbuŋkirun"to have a goal for".

References

External links

* Yonaguni phrasebook on

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Yonaguni Language Ryukyuan languages Endangered languages of Asia