Ryūkyū

Ryūkyū is the collective name for the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, stretching from Amami and Okinawa south to Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni; together with Japanese they form the Japonic family. Long isolation let their speech diverge from the Old Japanese of the mainland. The six recognized Ryukyuan languages are not mutually intelligible with Japanese or with one another.

Under the Ryukyu Kingdom the Shuri dialect of Okinawa served as the regional standard. The court wrote in kanji and hiragana borrowed from Japan: a royal tomb inscription of 1501 survives, and from 1531 the court compiled the Omoro Sōshi, twenty-two volumes of songs set mostly in hiragana, while Yonaguni kept its own glyphs.

In 1609 the Satsuma Domain of Kyushu conquered the kingdom; official documents then moved toward classical Chinese, though poetry and song continued in the Shuri dialect.