The Okinawan language, called Uchinaaguchi (うちなーぐち) by its speakers, is the traditional language of central and southern Okinawa Island. It is one of the Ryukyuan languages, a branch of the Japonic family that stands beside Japanese rather than inside it. It is not a dialect of Japanese: a speaker of standard Japanese cannot understand it without study.
It is also endangered. UNESCO lists it as such, and only a small share of residents now speak it as their main language. This page explains what the language is and why it counts as a language, how its use was pushed out of schools, how it sounds, the words a visitor will meet, what happened to it, and what is being done to keep it alive.
What Okinawan is
Three names for the language circulate, and they carry different politics. Uchinaaguchi (うちなーぐち) is Uchinaa, Okinawa, plus kuchi, mouth — the name used in the center and south of the main island, and the one visitors hear most. Shimakutuba (しまくとぅば) is the prefecture’s cover term for all of it, from shima, island or community, and kutuba, language. And in Okinawan, Japanese itself is yamatu-guchi (やまとぅぐち), “Yamato speech.”
What follows describes Okinawan proper: the speech of the central and southern main island and its nearby islands, the variety that court poetry, the great twentieth-century dictionaries and most teaching material are built on. The prefecture’s own survey finds that 3.4 percent of residents say they mainly speak it, and that most of those who use it at all use it for greetings. Nobody can tell you how many people speak it, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Okinawan belongs to the Japonic family, with Japanese and the other Ryukyuan languages, all descending from a common ancestor that comparative linguists call proto-Japonic (日琉祖語). The relationship rests on regular sound correspondences, not resemblance: word-initial p or f in Ryukyuan answers to h in standard Japanese, so Japanese hi, fire, is Okinawan fii. Uemura Yukio states the consequence flatly in his encyclopedia entry: Ryukyuan is the only language proven to be related to Japanese, and the two show orderly correspondences across a large part of the core vocabulary.
When the branches separated is a live disagreement. All parties agree the split came before the Nara period, because sound distinctions Japanese lost by the eighth century survive in Ryukyuan, and after rice cultivation, because rice vocabulary is shared. Thomas Pellard offers a personal estimate of the late Yayoi to Kofun period, roughly the third to sixth centuries, and concedes it is inference from social history; Igarashi calls the date plausible but notes no linguistic evidence has been produced for it. Uemura Yukio instead places the split “probably in the centuries around the turn of the era,” from a Kyushu dialect. Speakers reached the islands later, in the ninth to eleventh centuries, carrying Chinese-derived vocabulary borrowed in Kyushu — which is why Ryukyuan holds Chinese loans that entered Japanese only after Nara.
The branch is usually divided into six languages, on the test of mutual unintelligibility rather than of borders. The count is not fixed: some scholars group the northern varieties differently, and the prefecture’s own orthography guide follows the five-way division UNESCO uses inside the prefecture, with Amami, in Kagoshima Prefecture, outside it.
| Language | Where it is spoken | UNESCO listing, 2009 |
|---|---|---|
| Amami 奄美語 | Amami Oshima, northern Kikai, Tokunoshima and nearby islands, in Kagoshima Prefecture | Endangered |
| Kunigami 国頭語 | Northern main island, Yoron, Okinoerabu, southern Kikai | Endangered |
| Okinawan 沖縄語 | Central and southern main island and nearby islands | Endangered |
| Miyako 宮古語 | Miyako, Tarama and nearby islands | Endangered |
| Yaeyama 八重山語 | Ishigaki, Iriomote and nearby islands | Severely endangered |
| Yonaguni 与那国語 | Yonaguni Island | Severely endangered |
Okinawan is the best documented of the six, because the court and the universities sat there. The standard reference is NINJAL’s 『沖縄語辞典』 of 1963, some fifteen thousand Shuri entries in romanized phonological notation, compiled from Shimabukuro Seibin’s manuscript with Higa Shunchō and Hattori Shirō; the institute now publishes it online under an open license. The University of the Ryukyus’ 大琉球語辞典, released in October 2024 to search several regional dictionaries at once with sound files, is offline for rebuilding as of late 2026.
A caution about shimakutuba: a reference answer compiled by the Okinawa Prefectural Library finds the word in none of the three standard dictionaries, and quotes the lexicographer Ishizaki Hiroshi suggesting it spread as an administrative term in the 2000s. That does not make it wrong — it is the prefecture’s word, and it covers Miyako and Yaeyama, which uchinaaguchi does not.
Why it is not a dialect of Japanese
The word hōgen (方言), dialect, is not a neutral description in Japanese public life; it carries a ranking. In the Meiji period the new state chose a standard language and described everything else as deviation from it. The National Language Research Committee, established in 1902, listed the survey of dialects among its tasks and published reports on sounds in 1905 and colloquial grammar in 1906, with distribution maps, and Okinawa was measured inside that project. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes on its own map of endangered languages that UNESCO draws no distinction between “language” and “dialect” and calls all of them languages, while in Japan the seven non-Ainu entries are generally called dialects. Two vocabularies, same objects, different politics.
The linguistic case does not depend on the vocabulary. Uemura Yukio’s encyclopedia entry states that the speech of Miyako Island is not intelligible at all to people from the main island, that the speech of Yonaguni is not intelligible to people from either, and that no Ryukyuan variety is intelligible with any mainland variety. Nakamoto Masatake, in the same reference work, puts the spread among the varieties of Okinawa Prefecture as wider than the spread between the dialects of Tohoku and Kagoshima, the two poles of mainland Japanese.
The clearest demonstration is a set of sentences the prefecture published for schoolchildren: one self-introduction, “my name is Yūki,” in the speech of five places. These are not variants of one sentence. They are five sentences in five languages, and a speaker of any one will not follow the others without study.
| Variety and place | “My name is Yūki” | What a visitor would notice |
|---|---|---|
| Central and southern main island 中南部（那覇市那覇） | Haitai. Wā nā ya Yūkī yaibiin. はいたい。わー なーや ゆーきー やいびーん。 | The greeting haitai, the topic marker ya, the copula yaibiin. |
| Northern main island 北部（名護市久志） | Haitai, wā nā ya Yūkīndi yabiin. はいたい，わー なーや ゆーきんでぃ やびーん。 | Same greeting, but the copula is yabiin and the name takes ndi. |
| Miyako 宮古（宮古島市平良） | Hāi. Baga nā ya, Yūkīti du aiu. はーい。ばがなーや，ゆーきてぃ どぅ あいぅ。 | Baga for “my,” and a final verb unlike anything in the north. |
| Yaeyama 八重山（石垣市四箇） | Kuyōn nārā. Bā nā ya Yūkī yū. くよーんなーらー。ばー なーや ゆーきーゆー。 | A greeting like “good day,” bā for “my,” final yū. |
| Yonaguni 与那国（与那国町祖納） | Nsai warukaya. An’a na ya, Yūkī du naiburu. んさいわるかや。あんあ なや，ゆーきーどぅ ないぶる。 | A greeting with no relative on the list, and a copula found only here. |
Dialect tags and the push to replace Okinawan
In June 1917 the Naha newspaper 『琉球新報』 reported a small piece of school business: the prefectural First Middle School had cut wooden tags about two sun square and told pupils to hand one to any classmate heard speaking Okinawan outside the home. The holder had to find another offender and pass it on, and holding one carried a penalty. The tag was called a hōgen fuda, a dialect card, and what it policed was the ordinary speech of the island.
The usual history of the card is told wrong. English accounts almost always say a 1907 ordinance banned Okinawan in schools and imposed the dialect card. The 1907 date is a received account: Hamamoto Masayoshi took it in his 1971 history of the language from a single remark at a round table published in 1960, not from any legal text. Kondō Ken’ichirō, working through school commemorative volumes, documented cards in use by 1903 or 1904 — four years earlier, and with no ordinance behind them.
What is documented is stranger. In September 1915 the Okinawa Education Association answered a prefectural question with forty-one methods for enforcing standard speech, and the one concerning the card declines to endorse it: giving a punishment tag to pupils who use dialect “may be permissible as a temporary expedient depending on local conditions and school climate, but as a principle it is not a good method” (一時的方便トシテハ可ナランモ、主義トシテハ善キ方法ニアラザルベシ). A month later the prefecture circulated its own list of seventeen methods, and the card is absent from it. The First Middle School adopted the tag anyway, as the 1917 newspaper report records, and the poet Yamanokuchi Baku, then a pupil there, is remembered for collecting them on purpose. By 1920 the normal school forbade students from using the local language even off its grounds.
The state’s own reason deserves its words. The 1915 circular opens: “The spread of standard speech is an important matter for education in this prefecture” (普通語ノ普及ハ本県教育上重要ナル事ニ有之). Behind that sentence lay a real change: Meiji freedom of movement and mass schooling meant Okinawans who left for work or war were judged and paid by how they spoke. The association’s own report records families and neighbors mocking children who spoke standard Japanese at home — the pressure was not only downward.
Karimata Shigehisa, who directs the prefecture’s shimakutuba center, argues that the card is not the decisive cause: most Okinawans chose Japanese for work and migration, and the road not taken was bilingual education, not the absence of a tag. That is a judgment rather than a finding. What nobody disputes is the outcome.
How it sounds
Okinawan has five vowels, a i u e o, each long or short, and length distinguishes words. The striking feature against Japanese is that short e and o are rare: where Japanese has them, Okinawan very often has i and u, so me, eye, is mii, and kome, rice, is kumi. This is not decay. Six vowels are now reconstructed for proto-Japonic, and Ryukyuan is where the distinction survived.
Consonants can be glottalized, and the contrast is meaningful. The prefecture’s school reader teaches it with a Naha pair: wā (わー) is “I,” while the same syllable with a catch in the throat, ‘wā (ʔわー), is “pig.” Uemura adds ii, stomach, against ‘ii, matting rushes, and nni, rice plant, against ‘nni, chest. Okinawan also allows a doubled consonant at the start of a word, which Japanese does not: cchu (っちゅ), person. And Japanese ki corresponds to chi, so kimu, liver and by extension heart, is chimu (ちむ).
Two vowel correspondences do most of the work. Japanese o answers to Okinawan u. And the mainland diphthongs ai and ae became a long ee, while au and ao became long oo: mae, front, is mē; kyōdai, brothers, is chōdē (チョーデー). Nakamoto argued in 1976 that this fusion pushed the other vowels around in a chain, and that account is still repeated. Pellard has since argued it cannot be right, since the southern Ryukyuan languages fuse no diphthongs at all and narrow their vowels anyway; he proposes a drag chain instead. The correspondences are agreed; the mechanism is not.
| Meaning | Okinawan | What changed from proto-Japonic |
|---|---|---|
| eye | mii みー | Short e narrowed to i; the word lengthened to two morae. |
| hand | tii てぃー | Same narrowing, with t further forward than Japanese. |
| fire | fii ふぃー | Word-initial h stayed bilabial where Japanese moved it back. |
| water | miji みづぃ | Zu became ji; the vowel narrowed. |
| moon | chichi つぃち | Ts became ch; the vowel narrowed. |
| cloud | kumu くむ | Final o raised to u, the most reliable correspondence of all. |
| bone | funi ふに | Old bilabial h kept; ne became ni. |
| heart, mind | kukuru くくる | Both o vowels raised to u. |
| castle | gusiku ぐすぃく | The word behind the name of the Gusuku period. |
A note on spelling, because sources disagree. The Roman forms here follow a Hepburn-style system adapted for Okinawan: ch for the sound in chimu, f for the bilabial, an apostrophe for glottalization, macrons for long vowels. NINJAL’s dictionary romanizes by its own conventions, the prefecture’s 2022 guide prefers katakana, and shop signs improvise; where they disagree, the kana under each form is the authority.
Accent is what visitors never hear about and learners underestimate. Shuri Okinawan has pitch distinctions the dictionaries mark; they are not the Japanese ones, and they vary by island. Tourist material leaves the marks out. Copy the pitch you hear, not the pitch you expect.
The words you will actually meet
Okinawan vocabulary stays visible because it never left. Signs, menus and shop names are full of it, and much of the food vocabulary is not Japanese at all but Okinawan absorbed into local Japanese. Āmui (あーむい) is awamori, the distilled rice spirit. Tōfu (とーふ) is bean curd. Gusiku (ぐすぃく) is a castle, on every sign at a World Heritage site. Mabui (まぶい) is the soul, and chimu (ちむ), written with the character for liver, is glossed “heart” in the shimakutuba center’s graded word list, as kukuru is. The glossary keeps a running list; what follows is the small set that does work in conversation.
| What you want to say | Okinawan | How it is said, and to whom |
|---|---|---|
| Hello | Haisai はいさい | hai-sai. Men say haisai, women haitai (はいたい), though some districts use haisai for everyone; among friends or to someone younger, a plain hai (はい) will do. It serves all day, morning included, and the Itoman handbook gives haisai for a superior. |
| Thank you | Nifēdēbiru にふぇーでーびる | ni-fay-day-bi-ru. The polite form. The prefecture’s Naha handbook prints nifērēbiru (にふぇーれーびる) and its Itoman one nihērēbiru (にへーれーびる); the d and r vary by district. Casual: nifērō, nifēdō (にふぇーろー・にふぇーどー). |
| Welcome | Mensōrē めんそーれー | men-soo-reh. To a guest coming in, not a general hello. The handbook corrects the usual guess that it comes from 参り候らへ; it answers to 参り召しおわれ. |
| Please | Unigē sabira うにげーさびら | u-ni-geh sa-bi-ra. The -sabira ending is the polite layer; drop it among friends. |
| Excuse me | Guburī sabira ぐぶりーさびら | gu-bu-ree sa-bi-ra. For entering, leaving a room first, or passing in front of someone, as Japanese 失礼します does. |
| Sorry | Wassaibīn わっさいびーん | was-sai-been. The handbook’s word for “I am sorry”; wassaibītan (わっさいびーたん) is the politer form. |
| Yes | Uu, ii, ō うー・いー・おー | oo, ee, oh. To a superior, uu; to someone of your age or younger, ii; to someone you hold in respect, ō. The handbook sets out all three. |
| No | Ūū, ōō うーうー・おーおー | oo-oo, oh-oh. Here is the trap: a refusal is the assent said twice, so a single uu means yes and the doubled one means no. NINJAL’s dictionary enters both forms simply as “no,” without a politeness difference. |
| How much | Chassa ちゃっさ | chas-sa. Of price or of quantity: how much, how many. |
| Delicious | Māsan まーさん | maa-san. Of food; nīsan (にーさん) is the opposite. |
Two things need saying plainly. The politeness system is the hard part and the phrases are the easy part: Okinawan marks respect with verb endings and separate vocabulary, as Japanese does, and a phrase lifted from a website can be grammatically perfect and socially wrong. And everyday speech in Naha is mixed. In the prefecture’s 2024 survey, 42.5 percent use shimakutuba at least for greetings, but 26.1 percent of all respondents use it for greetings and little else, and only 3.4 percent mainly. A shopkeeper who grins at your haisai has understood you; that does not mean the next sentence should be in Okinawan.
There is also no word for “good morning,” and none for “good evening.” The prefecture’s Naha handbook states it as a fact about the language and gives what households said instead: ukimisōchii (うきみそーちー), “are you up?”, or hitimiti munō karii (ひてぃみてぃむのーかりー), “have you eaten breakfast?” That is not a gap to be filled by invention. It is what a language does when its mornings and evenings happen indoors, among people who already know each other.
What happened to it
The decline has a sequence. In 1879 the Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished and Okinawa Prefecture created; schools first taught Japanese through translation from Ryukyuan, using a textbook called 『沖縄対話』, then dropped the translation. From about 1903 the dialect card appears in school records. From 1915 the prefecture pushed standard speech through teachers, and from the 1920s through the normal school that trained them. Then came 1945, the destruction of the schools, and a postwar settlement in which Okinawan education was rebuilt in standard Japanese. Kondō’s point is that the card was never the main instrument; the main instrument was the ordinary classroom, every day, for two generations.
After the war there was a genuine fork, and it is documented. The occupation authorities asked the Okinawan association in Tokyo whether schooling should be in Okinawan; the educators consulted chose standard Japanese, a decision recorded in Higa Shunchō’s collected works. Teachers told children they would have to go to Japan to work, so they had better speak Japanese. Karimata’s summary is that this was a rational choice under pressure, and that the cost — a generation without literacy in its own language — was not counted at the time.
In 2009 UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, third edition, listed Okinawan as “definitely endangered,” with Yaeyama and Yonaguni “severely endangered.” The Agency for Cultural Affairs reproduces UNESCO’s own category labels on its map of Japan, the prefecture’s 2022 orthography guide gives the publication date, 19 February 2009, and the edition, and NINJAL’s endangered-language project describes the report as listing eight endangered languages in Japan: Ainu, Hachijō and the six Ryukyuan languages. The atlas’s own site is difficult to reach from outside Japan, so the wording here follows those three citations of it rather than the original.
The prefecture has surveyed residents at intervals since 2013, labeling each survey by fiscal year, and the latest report, published in March 2025, covers fieldwork in January and February of that year: 3,000 questionnaires by stratified two-stage random sampling, 1,043 valid responses, a 34.8 percent response rate, residents aged 18 and over. It measures self-report — how often you use shimakutuba, not whether you speak it, and how much you understand when you hear it. On those questions, 42.5 percent said they use it at least for greetings, up 5.7 points on the year before; 67.9 percent said they understand it well or to some degree; 77.1 percent feel attached to it. The age spread is the story: among respondents in their seventies, 92.4 percent understand it and 57.8 percent use it at least for greetings; among teenagers, 23.5 percent understand it and not one answered “understand well.”
| Fiscal year | Uses it at least for greetings | Uses it mainly |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 58.0% | 10.0% |
| 2016 | 54.1% | 6.9% |
| 2017 | 54.6% | 6.5% |
| 2018 | 49.8% | 6.1% |
| 2019 | 56.7% | 7.6% |
| 2020 | 43.2% | 3.6% |
| 2021 | 28.6% | 1.7% |
| 2022 | 39.0% | 5.0% |
| 2023 | 36.8% | 3.8% |
| 2024 | 42.5% | 3.4% |
The series is not a straight decline, and the reports do not explain the movements; the 28.6 percent low in 2021 and the recovery since sit in the record without commentary. One figure from this table is one question in one year. What survives every reading is the age gradient.
Two cautions about numbers in circulation. There is no credible total speaker count: figures such as “984,000 speakers” or “about 95,000 native speakers” trace to encyclopedia summaries, not surveys, and the prefecture has never published a headcount. Separately, the Ryukyu Shimpo’s own 2021 survey found 25 percent of respondents saying they could both understand and speak the language, down 15.8 points from its previous poll. That is a newspaper’s question, not the prefecture’s, and the two are not comparable.
What is being done now, and what a visitor can do
Okinawa Prefecture has legislated on this, which is unusual. An ordinance passed by member initiative on 31 March 2006, No. 35, declares shimakutuba “the substrate of this prefecture’s culture” and fixes 18 September as Shimakutuba Day. September 2026 marked twenty years, with a ceremony attended by about 150 people and awards to seven individuals and organizations. A promotion center followed in September 2017, directed by Karimata with five coordinators, and a second ten-year plan adopted in March 2023 sets a target for fiscal 2031 of 60 percent of residents using the language at least for greetings. Against 42.5 percent in 2024, that is a stretch stated openly.
The outputs are unglamorous. By fiscal 2021 the prefecture had distributed 255,500 copies of its shimakutuba readers to elementary and junior high schools, drawn 3,856 people in total since 2013 to an annual convention held around Shimakutuba Day, and honored 53 individuals and 11 organizations. Its proficiency test ran as a pilot in 2018, when 147 people applied, and by the 2020 sitting drew 869 candidates aged 5 to 81, of whom 733 passed. That test is now paused: on 19 October 2026 the prefecture announced an indefinite suspension, because there is no agreed framework of levels, no curriculum and no teaching materials, and said it would spend 2026 and 2027 working out what the Okinawan equivalents of a curriculum and a textbook should be. The honest reading is that the test got ahead of the teaching.
Broadcasting and classes fill part of the gap. NHK Okinawa’s Uchinā de Asobo (うちなーであそぼ) is a five-minute program of animated folk tales and songs in the islands’ languages, broadcast on the prefectural service on Saturdays at 12:40. The Naha Cultural Arts Theater ran a free uchinaaguchi course this autumn, eight sessions for about forty people, partly taught by actors who voice that program; it met on Sundays from 4 October to 22 November, with a public recital in December. NINJAL’s endangered-language program, running to 2028, is digitizing the tapes the Agency for Cultural Affairs made in the islands between 1977 and 1985 — the largest body of recorded speech that exists for some varieties.
Outside Japan the language lives mostly in community classes. In Hawaii, where Okinawan migration reached its centennial in 2000, the university opened courses in Okinawan language and culture after students asked for them; Kyoko Sera, the professor who built them, has said she grew up in the years when Okinawan was forbidden and did not speak it herself, though she understood it from the songs. None of this produces new first-language speakers; it is maintenance, done by people who mostly learned as adults.
For a visitor, the useful advice is small. Learn to recognize the language before trying to speak it: haisai and haitai on a sign, mensōrē at a shop door, māsan on a menu. Use the greeting and stop there; a visitor who says one word correctly and then switches to Japanese is doing the right thing, and one who recites a set phrase at a shopkeeper is not. Do not call it a dialect to someone who has just told you it is a language. Ask before recording anyone. If you want more than phrases, the prefecture’s free materials and the autumn course in Naha cost nothing but time, and they teach the politeness system, which is the part that matters. And when you hear a woman in her seventies say something to a grandchild that you cannot follow at all, that is not a dialect of the Japanese you know. It is the other branch.
Sources and further reading
Numbered in roughly the order the article relies on them. Japanese titles are given as published. Sources that are encyclopedia entries, government documents, institute or university pages, news reports or teaching material rather than peer-reviewed research are labeled as such, because the kind of authority differs. Each was consulted in Japanese.
Reference works and dictionaries
- Uemura Yukio 上村幸雄, 「琉球語」, in 『世界大百科事典』, Heibonsha, via Kotobank, kotobank.jp/word/琉球語-658641 — encyclopedia entry. Mutual unintelligibility, the dating caveat, and the phonological sketch.
- Nakamoto Masatake 中本正智, 「沖縄語」, in 『日本大百科全書（ニッポニカ）』, Shogakukan, same Kotobank page — encyclopedia entry. The five-way division and the Tohoku–Kagoshima comparison.
- National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 『沖縄語辞典』 (1963), online edition OMOLO, ninda.ninjal.ac.jp/s/omolo/jiten — reference work, CC BY 4.0. Every Okinawan form, gloss and accent mark here was checked against it.
- 「沖縄語辞典」, in 『日本歴史地名大系』, via Kotobank, kotobank.jp/word/沖縄語辞典-3108444 — reference work. The dictionary’s provenance and size.
- Karimata Shigehisa 狩俣繁久, 大琉球語辞典, University of the Ryukyus, released 31 October 2024, u-ryukyu.ac.jp/news/62768 — university page.
Official documents, surveys and prefectural material
- Agency for Cultural Affairs 文化庁, 「ユネスコが認定した，日本における危機言語の分布図」, bunka.go.jp/…/kikigengo — official document. Japan’s reproduction of the 2009 categories, and the note on language versus dialect.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 「しまくとぅばの日に関する条例」, Ordinance No. 35 of 31 March 2006, pref.okinawa.jp/…/shimakutubanohinikansurujourei.pdf — official document.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 「しまくとぅば普及推進計画（第２期計画）」, March 2023, pref.okinawa.jp/…/0911dai2kikeikaku.pdf — official document. Cumulative distribution and attendance figures, and the 2031 targets.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 『沖縄県しまくとぅば県民意識調査 報告書』, March 2025, pref.okinawa.lg.jp/…/r6ishikityousa.pdf — official survey report. The 2024 figures, the age breakdown and the survey design.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 『沖縄県における「しまくとぅば」の表記について』, Shima-kutuba Orthography Review Committee, 30 March 2022, pref.okinawa.jp/…/1009625.html — official document. The five regional divisions and the katakana notation.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 『しまくとぅば読本』, elementary school edition, shimakutuba.jp/learn/document — teaching material. The five-language self-introductions, the glottal-stop minimal pair, and the absence of a word for “good morning.”
- Okinawa Prefecture Shima-kutuba Promotion Office, 「しまくとぅば検定の休止について」, 19 October 2026, shimakutuba.jp/news/post6364 — official notice.
- Okinawa Prefectural Archives, 「2006年9月18日 「しまくとぅばの日」の始まり」, archives.pref.okinawa.jp/news/that_day/4940 — archive page.
- Okinawa Prefecture, 「しまくとぅば普及推進計画」 overview page, pref.okinawa.jp/…/1011778.html — prefectural page.
- Okinawa Prefecture Shima-kutuba Promotion Center, 「令和４年度 しまくとぅば検定結果集計データの公開」, 20 March 2023, shimakutuba.jp/shimakotoba-info/post3406 — official notice and results table for the three regional tests.
Research institutes, universities and scholarship
- National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 「消滅危機言語の保存研究」 project page, ninjal.ac.jp/…/endangered-languages — research institute page.
- Thomas Pellard and Igarashi Yōsuke 五十嵐陽介, 「日本語と琉球諸語のルーツをひもとく」, 『ことばの波止場』 13-1, NINJAL, 20 November 2023, kotoba.ninjal.ac.jp/digest/13-1/d-13-02 — research institute interview. The separation debate and the migration chronology.
- Thomas Pellard, 「琉球諸語の母音体系の形成過程」, symposium 「日琉諸方言系統論の展望」, 19 December 2020, ninjal.ac.jp/…/20201219-6_Pellard.pdf — conference slides. The cognate forms, the six-vowel reconstruction, and the critique of Nakamoto’s chain shift.
- Kondō Ken’ichirō 近藤健一郎, 「方言札の広がりととまどい ―「普通語ノ励行方法答申書」（一九一五年）を中心に―」, 『沖縄文化研究』 44 (2017), 35–76, doi.org/10.15002/00013795 — peer-reviewed article. The 1915 answer document, the prefectural circular, and the 1917 school report.
- Kondō Ken’ichirō, 「禁じられた言葉―近代沖縄における方言札の出現時期とその歴史的意義」, 『日本教育学会大會研究発表要項』 63, jstage.jst.go.jp/…/63_KJ00004056867 — conference paper. The earliest testimonies, around 1903–04, and the origin of the 1907 date.
- Okinawa Prefectural Library, National Diet Library Collaborative Reference Database, case 1000100989, crd.ndl.go.jp/reference/…?id=1000100989 — library reference answer. The encyclopedia entries and Kondō’s correction of the 1907 date.
- Okinawa Prefectural Library, National Diet Library Collaborative Reference Database, case 1000227574, crd.ndl.go.jp/reference/…?id=1000227574 — library reference answer. The terminology discussion and the dictionaries’ silence on shimakutuba.
- Okinawa Prefecture Culture Association, Shima-kutuba Promotion Center, 『しまくとぅば検定９級のための単語帳』, 2019, shimakutuba.jp/learn/document — language-learning material. The greeting, thanks and mealtime phrases, and the note on men’s and women’s forms.
- Shima-kutuba Promotion Center, 「しまくとぅば普及センターについて」, shimakutuba.jp/about — center page. Founding date and staffing.
News reporting
- Okinawa Times, 「古里の言葉 継承誓う しまくとぅばの日20年 ７個人・団体表彰」, 19 September 2026, okinawatimes.co.jp/articles/-/1927518 — news report.
- Okinawa Times, 「シマクトゥバ講師養成へ 普及センター、受講生募集」, 26 July 2026, okinawatimes.co.jp/articles/-/1888239 — news report.
- Ryukyu Shimpo, 「「潜在話者」復興の鍵 話せる場づくりが課題」, 3 January 2022, ryukyushimpo.jp/news/entry-1448561 — news report. The paper’s own 2021 survey and the “latent speaker” discussion.
- Ryukyu Shimpo, 「しまくとぅば普及へ、ハワイの事例に学ぶ ハワイ大・聖田京子名誉教授「言葉と文化は一体」」, 13 May 2023, ryukyushimpo.jp/news/entry-1709326 — news report. The Hawaii courses.
- Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting (QAB), 「復帰50の物語 第28話 禁じられた しまくとぅば」, 21 July 2022, qab.co.jp/news/20220721153524 — news feature. Postwar classroom testimony and Karimata’s argument.
- Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting (QAB), 「しまくとぅば検定合格発表」, 24 February 2021, qab.co.jp/news/20210224134340 — news report. The 869 candidates aged 5 to 81 and the 733 passes.
- Okinawa Times, 「しまくとぅば「使う」沖縄県民は42.5％ 2024年度、県民意識調査 前年度比5.7ポイント増加 継承が課題」, 23 April 2025, okinawatimes.co.jp/articles/-/1570166 — news report on the 2024 survey.
Learning material and venue pages
- NHK, 「うちなーであそぼ」 program page, nhk.jp/p/ts/Z9JX79P71K — broadcaster page. The program’s length, content and Saturday broadcast time.
- Naha Cultural Arts Theater なはーと, 「令和８年度うちなーぐち講座＆成果発表」, nahart.jp/course/1789530481 — venue page.
- Okinawa Prefecture Shima-kutuba Promotion Center, 『かたらな ちからな しまくとぅば』 (Naha speech), 2018, shimakutuba.jp/…/dd000cbee210f511719484d3cf1d0af5.pdf — teaching material. The yes ladder, the excuse-me forms, the missing “good morning,” and the note on where mensōrē comes from.
- Okinawa Prefecture Shima-kutuba Promotion Center, 『あびらやー ちからやー しまくとぅば』 (Itoman speech), 17 March 2020, shimakutuba.jp/…/160b45ef812584da836ad1f4bedf088b.pdf — teaching material. The apology forms, the greeting set, and a second district’s spelling of the thank-you phrase.