User:Aconant1/Language selection

Given my experience with Japanese, my language choices consist of languages that are thought to be relatives.

Central Okinawan (沖縄口)

Background info

Central Okinawan is a Northern Ryukyuan language mostly spoken in the Japanese island of Okinawa. 980,000 speakers exist as of the year 2000, and its ISO code is [ryu]. Because Japanese is the main focus of the standard education system in Japanese, young speakers of Central Okinawan are dwindling.

Morphological typology

I was not able to find anything concrete about the morphological typology of Central Okinawan (other than talk pages on wikis arguing about the typologies of various hōgen as dialects vs. languages), but given that its close relative, Japanese, is an agglutinative language, it seems very reasonable to categorize Central Okinawan similarly.

Availability of text

The same grammar as Amami hōgen exists for Central Okinawan, including the sample pear story. Additionally, a great deal of example sentences for grammatical points can be found on Wikipedia.

Northern Amami hōgen (奄美方言)

Background info

Amami hōgen is spoken in the namesake Amami islands of Japan. As of 2004, only ~12,000 fluent speakers of the language exist, and are mostly elderly. The language has an ISO code of [ryn]. As a Ryukyuan language, no standard orthography for Amami hōgen exists.

Morphological typology

Like Central Okinawan, Amami hōgen shares an agglutinative nature with Japanese.

Availability of text

A grammar for Amami hōgen exists, including a sample story. Because the language is not normally written, finding text written in Amami hōgen may prove difficult, but using Japanese katakana in order to represent the sounds of Amami hōgen would be trivial.