Learn the Okinawa Dialect from Byron

What a great video! Byron Fija is one of the leading lights among the younger generation of Okinawans who want to preserve their language and I’m a big fan of his. (His surname Fija is the native pronunciation of 比嘉, the most common surname in Okinawa and usually pronounced Higa by Yamatonchu.)

Mumyou, I might even add that Byron’s Okinawan is the language spoken at the capital in Shuri, and that there are many more variations on other islands. Even the Kagoshiman islands like Tokunoshima and Amami speak languages related to Okinawan!

I really wish there were more educational materials for English speakers to learn Okinawan. The text that I still think is the best, even over 100 years after it was first published, is Basil Chamberlain’s “Essay in Aid of a Grammar and Dictionary of the Luchuan Language”, published for the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1895. (Volume 23, Supplemental issue — ask your university library!) In the late 1800s there was little documentation of Okinawan aside from a very simplistic phrasebook published for mainland officials, so professor Chamberlain, an avid learner of Japanese culture even after many years in the country, went to Shuri, the Ryukyuan capital, in 1894, and documented everything he could. To this day, it remains a great textbook for learning to speak polite Shuri, and I’d be surprised if Byron Fija hasn’t hunted up a copy for himself.

Another good book, if you have enough Japanese to read it, is Satoshi Nishioka’s book and CD set, 楽しいウチナーグチ (Tanoshii Uchināguchi, available used through Amazon). It looks difficult on the surface, but if you use kanji where possible, it starts to get easier.

Maybe the difference between Okinawan and Japanese is like the difference between English and Dutch — some regular pronunciation variations, some different vocabulary and grammar, but a lot of connections.

Nishioka’s book even introduces some conversations from Miyako and Yaeyama, which are very different from the language of Shuri as seen in this video. (Weirdo, I remember trying to communicate with you in ドゥナンムヌイ (与那国語) a while ago and that our languages were mutually incomprehensible. ^_^; )

All my time in Okinawa has been spent in the “Further Isles” west of Miyako, so I don’t speak much Shuri at all. I’m off to watch the rest of Byron’s videos now!

Oops, the last part of that third paragraph should be “connections that wouldn’t exist if you were learning, say, an Aboriginal Australian or Polynesian language”!