“Wanne Uchinanchu – I am Okinawan.” Japan, the US and Okinawa's Endangered Languages

要旨

Heinrich interviews Fija Bairon onOkinawa's endangered languages and culture, and efforts to restore them.The proportion of languages and of nation states stands roughly at a relation of 1 to 30.Hence, the predominant number of nation states is multilingual.Japan, notwithstanding its modern monolingual self-perception, is no exception.As with many other nation states, Japan has merely been invented as an "imagined community" of monolingual and monocultural members.The effects of monolingual and monocultural nation imagining are far-reaching for linguistic and cultural minorities, in Japan as in many other places across the world.For minorities, modernisation and incorporation often went hand in hand with pressures to abandon local languages and cultures.Monolingual nationimagining ideology is one of the major forces behind the unprecedented loss of linguistic diversity we are witnessing today.Experts project that only 10-15% of the world's 6,000 languages are safe from extinction.In Japan, the Ainu languages, the Ryukyuan languages and Ogasawara-Creole English are extremely endangered while Japanese and Japanese sign language are safe.Many minority community members are aware of such "dark sides of modernity."In this article Okinawan language and cultural activist Fija Bairon speaks on the discovery of his Okinawan identity and on his attempts to maintain and revitalize Uchinaguchi, one of five Ryukyuan languages.An introduction addresses issues of Ryukyuan language endangerment and the local attempts of language revitalization.

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