Japanese Dialects and Ryukyuan

要旨

Abstract Located between multilingual/multiethnic areas—South-East Asia (Chs. 15–17) in the south and the Asian North Pacific Rim (Chs. 19–20) in the north- east—the Japanese islands, by contrast, tend to be regarded as having little linguistic diversity, although there are a few non-Japanese languages such as Ainu (§ 19.2) and immigrants ‘ languages like Korean. Japanese is considered to be one language with a variety of dialects. Ryukyuan or Ryukyu-go (-go meaning “language “) is usually treated as a Japanese dialect but actually should be considered a separate language from Japanese or a considerably divergent branch of the “Japanese-Ryukyuan “ family.

主題