Japonic languages

Japanese is the national language of Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese, recorded using Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries.[8] It differs from modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences.[9] The script also distinguishes eight vowels (or diphthongs), with two each corresponding to modern i, e and o.[10] Most of the texts reflect the speech of the area around Nara, the capital, but over 300 poems are written in eastern dialects of Old Japanese.[11][12]

The language experienced a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, beginning with the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and 9th centuries.[13] These loanwords now account for about half the lexicon.[14] They also affected the sound system of the language, adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals and geminate consonants, which became separate morae.[15]

Modern mainland Japanese dialects, spoken on Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, are generally grouped as:[16]

• Eastern Japanese, including most dialects from Nagoya east, including the modern standard Tokyo dialect.
• Western Japanese, including most dialects west of Nagoya, including the Kyoto dialect.
• Kyushu dialects, spoken on the island of Kyushu, including the Kagoshima dialect/Satsugū dialect, spoken in Kagoshima Prefecture in southern Kyushu.

The early capitals of Nara and Kyoto lay within the western area, and their Kansai dialect retained its prestige and influence long after the capital was moved to Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1603. Indeed, the dialect of Tokyo has several western features not found in other eastern dialects.[17]

The Hachijō language, spoken on Hachijō-jima and the Daitō Islands, including Aogashima, is highly divergent and varied. It has a mix of conservative features inherited from Eastern Old Japanese and influences from modern Japanese, making it difficult to classify.[18][19][20] Hachijō is an endangered language with a small population of elderly speakers.[5]

Southern and central Ryukyu islands

The Ryukyuan languages were originally and traditionally spoken throughout the Ryukyu Islands, an island arc stretching between the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the island of Taiwan. Most are considered "definitely" or "critically endangered" due to the spread of mainland Japanese.[21]

Since Old Japanese displays several innovations not shared with Ryukyuan, the two branches must have separated before the 7th century.[22] The move from Kyushu to the Ryukyus may have occurred later, possibly coinciding with the rapid expansion of the agricultural Gusuku culture in the 10th and 11th centuries.[23] Such a date would explain the presence in proto-Ryukyuan of Sino-Japanese vocabulary borrowed from Early Middle Japanese.[24] After the migration to the Ryukyus, there was limited influence from mainland Japan until the conquest of the Ryukyu Kingdom by the Satsuma Domain in 1609.[25]

Ryukyuan varieties are considered dialects of Japanese in Japan, but have little intelligibility with Japanese or even amongst each other.[26] They are divided into northern and southern groups, corresponding to the physical division of the chain by the 250 km-wide Miyako Strait.[21]

Northern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the northern part of the chain, including the major Amami and Okinawa Islands. They form a single dialect continuum, with mutual unintelligibility between widely separated varieties.[27] The major varieties are, from northeast to southwest:[28]

• Kikai, on the island of Kikaijima.
• Northern Amami Ōshima, spoken in most of Amami Ōshima
• Southern Amami Ōshima, spoken in Setouchi on the southern end of Amami Ōshima.
• Tokunoshima, on the island of Tokunoshima.
• Okinoerabu, on the island of Okinoerabujima
• Yoron, on the island of Yoronjima.
• Northern Okinawan, spoken in the northern part of Okinawa Island, including the cities of Nakijin and Nago.
• (Central) Okinawan, spoken in the central and southern parts of Okinawa Island, and neighboring islands. The prestige dialect is spoken in Naha, and the former city of Shuri. The Shuri dialect was the lingua franca of the Ryukyuan Kingdom, and was first recorded in the 16th century, particularly in the Omoro Sōshi anthology.[21][29]

There is no agreement on the subgrouping of these varieties. One proposal has three subgroups, with the central "Kunigami" branch comprising varieties from Southern Amami to Northern Okinawan, based on similar vowel systems and patterns of lenition of stops. Pellard suggests a binary division based on shared innovations, with an Amami group including the varieties from Kikai to Yoron, and an Okinawa group comprising the varieties of Okinawa and smaller islands to its west.[30]

Southern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the southern part of the chain, the Sakishima Islands. They comprise three distinct language continua:[27]

• Miyako is spoken in the Miyako Islands, with dialects on Irabu and Tarama.
• Yaeyama is spoken in the Yaeyama Islands (except Yonaguni), with dialects on each island, but primarily Ishigaki Island, Iriomote Island, and Taketomi Island.
• Yonaguni, spoken on Yonaguni Island, is phonologically distinct, but is lexically closer to other Yaeyama varieties.[31]

The southern Ryukyus were settled by Japonic speakers from the northern Ryukyus in the 13th century, leaving no linguistic trace of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.[25]

Korea in the late 4th century

There is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula:[6][7][5]

• Chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi (compiled in 1145) contains a list of pronunciations and meanings of placenames in the former kingdom of Goguryeo. As the pronunciations are given using Chinese characters, they are difficult to interpret, but several of those from central Korea, in the area south of the Han River captured from Baekje in the 5th century, seem to correspond to Japonic words.[32][5] Scholars differ on whether they represent the language of Goguryeo or of people they conquered.[5][33]
• The Silla placenames listed in chapter 34 of the Samguk sagi are not glossed, but many of them are explicable as Japonic words.[5]
• A single word is explicitly attributed to the language of the southern Gaya confederacy, in chapter 44 of the Samguk sagi. It is a word for 'gate', and appears similar in form to the Old Japanese word to₂ with the same meaning.[34][35]
• Alexander Vovin suggests that the ancient name for the kingdom of Tamna on Jeju Island, tammura, may have a Japonic etymology tani mura 'valley settlement' or tami mura 'people's settlement'.[36]

Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic, and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan as Insular Japonic.[5]

According to Shirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language.[37] None of these attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family.[5]

The most systematic comparisons have involved Korean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japanese. Samuel Elmo Martin, John Whitman and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences.[5][38][39] However, Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, while the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese.[40] He thus suggests that, to eliminate early loans from Korean, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese.[41] This procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic.[42]

Proto-Japonic words are generally polysyllabic, with syllables having the form (C)V. The following proto-Japonic consonant inventory is generally agreed, except for the values of *w and *j (see below):[58]

It is agreed that the Old Japanese voiced consonants b, d, z and g, which never occurred word-initially, are derived from clusters of nasals and voiceless consonants.[59] In most cases, the two consonants were brought together by loss of the intervening vowel. A few words display no evidence for a former vowel, and scholars reconstruct a syllable-final nasal of indeterminate place preceding the voiceless obstruent, as in *tunpu > tubu 'grain', *pinsa > piza 'knee'. These nasals are unrelated to the moraic nasal of later forms of Japonic, which derive from contractions or borrowings from other languages such as Chinese.[60]

The other Old Japanese consonants are projected back to Proto-Japonic, except that authors disagree on whether the sources of Old Japanese w and y should be reconstructed as glides *w and *j, or as voiced stops *b and *d respectively, based on Ryukyuan reflexes:[58]

• Southern Ryukyuan varieties have /b/ corresponding to Old Japanese w, e.g. ba 'I' and bata 'stomach' corresponding to Old Japanese wa and wata.[61] Two dialects spoken around Toyama Bay on the west coast of Honshu also have /b/ corresponding to initial /w/ in other Japanese dialects.[62]
• Yonaguni (at the far end of the Ryukyu island chain) has /d/ where Old Japanese has y, e.g. da 'house', du 'hot water' and dama 'mountain' corresponding to Old Japanese ya, yu and yama.[61]

Many authors, including advocates of a genetic relationship with Korean and other northeast-Asian languages, argue that Southern Ryukyuan initial /b/ and Yonaguni /d/ are retentions of Proto-Japonic voiced stops *b and *d that became /w/ and /j/ elsewhere through a process of lenition.[63] However, many linguists, especially in Japan, prefer the opposite hypothesis—that Southern Ryukyuan initial /b/ and Yonaguni /d/ are derived from local innovations where Proto-Japonic *w and *j underwent fortition.[64] The case for lenition of *d- > j- is substantially weaker, with the fortition hypothesis supported by Sino-Japonic words with Middle Chinese initials in *j also having reflexes of initial /d/ in Yonaguni, such as dasai from Middle Chinese 野菜 *jia-tsʰʌi.[65] Further evidence is provided by an entry in the late-15th-century Korean annal Seongjong Taewang Sillok recording the local name of the island of Yonaguni in Idu script as 閏伊是麼, which has the Middle Korean reading zjuni sima, with sima glossed in the text as the Japonic word for 'island'. This is direct evidence of an intermediate stage of the fortition *j- > *z- > d- leading to the modern name /dunaŋ/ 'Yonaguni'.[66]

Most authors accept six proto-Japonic vowels:[67]

The vowels *i, *u, *ə and *a are obtained by internal reconstruction from Old Japanese, with the other Old Japanese vowels derived from vowel clusters.[68][69] The mid vowels *e and *o are required to account for Ryukyuan correspondences.[70] In Old Japanese, they were raised to i and u respectively, except in word-final position.[69][71] They have also left some traces in eastern Old Japanese dialects,[72] and are also found in some early mokkan, and in some modern Japanese dialects.[73]

The other vowels of Old Japanese are believed to derive from sequences of vowels in Proto-Japanese, with different reflexes in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese:[74][75]

For the majority of cases, Proto-Japonic *əi corresponds to Old Japanese i₂. Proto-Japonic *əi is reconstructed for Old Japanese e₂ in the few cases it alternates with o₂ (< *ə). Some authors propose a high central vowel *ɨ to account for these alternations, but there is no evidence for it in Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese.[76][77] The reasons for this alternate reflex e₂ are unclear, but the instances where it appears seem to be limited to specific single-mora roots such as se~so₂ 'back', me₂~mo₂ 'seaweed', and possibly ye~yo₂ 'handle'.

The Japanese pitch accent is usually not recorded in the Old Japanese script.[78] The oldest description of the accent, in the 12th-century dictionary Ruiju Myōgishō, defines accent classes which generally account for correspondences between modern mainland Japanese dialects.[79] However, Ryukyuan languages share a set of accent classes that cut across these.[80] For example, for two-syllable words, the Ruiju Myōgishō defines five accent classes, which are reflected in different ways in the three major accent systems of mainland Japanese, here represented by Kyoto, Tokyo and Kagoshima. In each case the pattern of high and low pitches is shown across the two syllables and a following neutral particle. Ryukyuan languages, here represented by Kametsu (the prestige variety of the Tokunoshima language), show a three-way division that partially cuts across the five mainland classes.

In some Ryukyuan dialects, including Shuri, subclass (a) is marked by a long vowel in the first syllable instead of a distinct pitch pattern, leading Hattori to suggest that the original distinction was one vowel length.[83]

The following personal pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic, based on Old Japanese and Ryukyuan data.[84][85]

• *a(ra), *wa 'I' (singular)
• *wa(ja) 'we' (plural)
• *u, *o 'you' (singular)
• *uja, *ura 'you' (plural)

The form *na, which may have been borrowed from Koreanic, yields an ambivalent personal pronoun in Japanese, a second-person pronoun in Northern Ryukyuan, and a reflexive pronoun in Southern Ryukyuan.[86][87]

The following interrogative pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic.

• *ta 'who'
• *na 'what'
• *etu 'when'
• *e(ntu)ku 'where'
• *eka 'how'

The question particle was *ka.

The following demonstrative pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic.[88][89]

• *i 'this' (proximal)
• *sə 'that' (distal)

The daughter languages later innovated a mesial, causing a split within the demonstrative system. Eventually, proximal *i was lost and replaced by *kə. Distal *sə eventually became mesial, while *ka, which was apophonic to the newly-replaced proximal, became the distal pronoun in all of the modern languages. Proto-Ryukyuan later replaced *sə with *o, which was unrelated.[90]

The Japonic numerals are: