Amami and Okinawa, the Northern Ryukyuan languages

Abstract

Both Amami and Okinawa belong to the Northern Ryukyuan languages. They are spoken in the southwest region in Japan, and the northern part of the Ryukyu archipelago. Both languages are descended from the same ancestral language. Thus, they have many common features, e.g. glottalized consonants, agglutinative verbal morphology, and correspondence between plural/case markers and so-called animacy hierarchy. However, they also have many different features, e.g. syllable structures (i.e. “pre-syllable” in Okinawa only), verb-final affixes (i.e. the verb-final affix -n in Amami is used in relative clauses, but it is used in main clauses in Okinawa), grammatical numbers (i.e. dual number in Amami only), and degree of grammaticalization in adjectival morphology (i.e. more grammaticalized in Okinawa). You can compare several aspects of those two languages in detail in this chapter.