Japanese ryūkyū

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Card with the different dialects of Japanese

Japanese Ryūkyū ( Japanese 日本語族 , nihongozoku , German "Japanese language family") is a small language family consisting of modern Japanese with its regional dialects (125 million speakers in total), the five Ryūkyū languages on the Ryūkyū Islands - mostly Okinawa - spoken by about a million people, and the Peninsular Japonic , which was historically spoken in parts of the Korean Peninsula . The Japanese-Ryūkyū family is sometimes referred to as the Japanese language family or - based on the English term Japonic languages - as the Japanese language family .

Japanese and the Ryūkyū languages

The Japanese languages ​​today can be divided into two well-defined branches, the Japanese and the Ryūkyū languages.

Due to the geographical conditions, many regional dialects have been preserved in Japan : In addition to the division into four large and several thousand small islands, the country has only a few large fertile plains, 80% of the land area are mountains, which form natural borders for the language areas . The connecting link was coastal shipping. The same applies to the Ryūkyū languages, which are split up into individual dialects on a long archipelago with many small islands with their speaking communities. A precise separation between Japanese and the Ryūkyū languages ​​is hardly possible today, since the dialects of the Ryūkyū Islands are more similar to modern Japanese the closer they are geographically to the main islands. In contrast, towards the south the extent of the Ryūkyū-specific elements increases.

The number of Ryūkyū residents who only speak standard Japanese is constantly increasing, so that the Ryūkyū languages ​​are declining accordingly in their number of speakers (around one million today). The following applies to the largest Ryūkyū language, Okinawa : adult speakers are usually bilingual in Okinawa and Japanese, the age group between 20 and 50 understands Okinawa, but generally uses Japanese - even at home. Those under 20 years of age grew up speaking monolingual Japanese. There are hardly any monolingual Okinawa speakers even in the oldest speaker group. Even this Ryūkyū language (the one with the most speakers) is in danger of survival; this is all the more true for the smaller languages ​​of this group.

The structure of the language family

According to most researchers, the Japanese family includes the following languages ​​and dialects:

  • Japanese   (5 languages ​​or dialect clusters with 126 million speakers)
    • Japanese
      • Japanese (125 million speakers)
      • Hachijō (a few thousand speakers)
    • Peninsular Japanese (Extinct)
    • Ryūkyū (about 1 million speakers)
      • Okinawa-Amami (about 900 thousand speakers)
        • Amami, dialects: Amami-Oshima, Kikai, Toku-no-shima
        • Okinawa, dialects: Shuri, Kunigami, Oki-no-erabu, Yoron
      • Sakishima (about 100 thousand speakers)
        • Miyako-Yaeyama, dialects: Miyako , Yaeyama ( possibly two languages )
        • Yonaguni

origin

The languages ​​of the Japanese Ryūkyū family are traced back to a hypothetical Proto-Japanese on which today's languages ​​(or dialects) are based. Proto-Japanese is said to have its linguistic origin in south-eastern China or eastern China. At least since 1500 BC. Japonian is said to have been present in today's Korean Peninsula, where it was spoken by the people of the Mumun culture . From 300 BC BC Proto-Koreans immigrated from Manchuria to the peninsula and triggered the Yayoi migration to Japan. The remaining Proto-Japanese lived parallel to the newly arrived Proto-Koreans and were slowly assimilated.

Hypotheses about further relationship

The Japanese languages ​​are generally considered to be a separate language family with no other relatives. However, there are some hypotheses regarding a further relationship. None of these are recognized by today's experts.

Some researchers include the Japanese languages ​​- together with Korean - in the group of so-called Altaic languages (see also Macro-Altaic ). Whether Altaic is a genetic unit (i.e. a language family) or only forms an areal linguistic union is controversial. The majority opinion tends towards the Sprachbund thesis. It is also unclear where the “original Japanese” vocabulary comes from, which today forms the Kun reading of Japanese characters. Modern Korean and modern Japanese show a great deal of similarity in the Chinese loanwords, but also little in the lexemes .

Syntax , agglutinating language structure and polite language indicate a relationship with the Korean but also with the Austronesian languages . Some researchers support the relationship to the Austronesian languages, with which Japanese also has strong similarities in the sound system (phonology).

Other, less well-known hypotheses support a relationship to the Sinotibetan languages , the Tai-Kadai languages , the Austro-Asian languages or the Ainu language .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexander Vovin: Origins of the Japanese Language . In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics . September 26, 2017, doi : 10.1093 / acrefore / 9780199384655.013.277 ( oxfordre.com [accessed July 21, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Nicolas Tranter: Introduction: typology and area in Japan and Korea , in Nicolas Tranter (ed.): The Languages ​​of Japan and Korea , Routledge, 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-46287-7 , pp. 3–23.
  3. ↑ Alexander Vovin: Out of Southern China? ( academia.edu [accessed July 21, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Juha Janhunen: Reconstructing the Language Map of Prehistorical Northeast Asia . In: Studia Orientalica Electronica . tape 108 , 2010, ISSN  2323-5209 , p. 281-304 (English).
  5. ↑ Sean Lee, Toshikazu Hasegawa: Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences . tape 278 , no. 1725 , December 22, 2011, ISSN  0962-8452 , p. 3662–3669 , doi : 10.1098 / rspb.2011.0518 , PMID 21543358 , PMC 3203502 (free full text).
  6. ^ Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean". Korean Linguistics. 15 (2): 222-240.
  7. ^ John Whitman: Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan . In: Rice . tape 4 , no. 3 , December 1, 2011, ISSN  1939-8433 , p. 149–158 , doi : 10.1007 / s12284-011-9080-0 .
  8. ↑ Unger, J. Marshall (2009). The role of contact in the origins of the Japanese and Korean languages. Honolulu: University of Hawai?
  9. ↑ Alexander Vovin: Origins of the Japanese Language . In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics . September 26, 2017, doi : 10.1093 / acrefore / 9780199384655.013.277 ( oxfordre.com [accessed July 21, 2019]).
  10. ^ Javanese influence on Japanese - Languages ​​Of The World . In: Languages ​​Of The World . May 9, 2011 ( languagesoftheworld.info [accessed July 25, 2018]).
  11. ↑ Alexander Vovin: Is Japanese Related to Austronesian? In: Oceanic Linguistics . tape 33 , no. 2 , 1994, p. 369-390 , doi : 10.2307 / 3623134 , JSTOR : 3623134 .
  12. ↑ 飯 野 睦 毅 (1994) 『奈良 時代 の 日本語 を 解 読 す る』 東陽 出版
  13. ↑ David B. Solnit: Japanese / Austro-Tai By Paul K. Benedict (review) . In: Language . tape 68 , no. 1 , 1992, ISSN  1535-0665 , pp. 188–196 , doi : 10.1353 / lan.1992.0061 ( jhu.edu [accessed July 21, 2019]).
  14. ^ Gerhard Jäger: Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . tape 112 , no. 41 , October 13, 2015, ISSN  0027-8424 , p. 12752-12757 , doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1500331112 , PMID 26403857 , PMC 4611657 (free full text).

literature

  • Miller, Roy Andrew: The Japanese Language. History and structure. Monographs from the German Institute for Japanese Studies of the Philipp Franz von Siebold Foundation. Volume 4 1967. (Reprinted by Iudicium-Verlag 2000.)
  • Miller, Roy Andrew: Languages ​​and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic. White Orchid Press. The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. Oslo (printed by Bangkok) 1996.
  • Shibatani, Masayoshi: The Languages ​​of Japan. Cambridge University Press 1990.