Okinawan scripts



Okinawan language, spoken in Okinawa Island, was once the official language of the Ryukyu Kingdom. At the time, documents were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan.
Nowadays, most Japanese, as well as most Okinawans, tend to think of Okinawan as merely a dialect of Standard Japanese, even though the language is not mutually intelligible to Japanese speakers. As a "dialect", modern Okinawan is not written frequently. When it is, the Japanese writing system is generally used in an ad hoc manner. There is no standard orthography for the modern language. Nonetheless, there are a few systems used by scholars and laypeople alike. None of them are widely used by native speakers, but represent the language with less ambiguity than the ad hoc conventions. The Roman alphabet in some form or another is used in some publications, especially those of an academic nature.

Systems

Conventional usages

The modern conventional ad hoc spellings found in Okinawa.

Council system

The system devised by the Council for the Dissemination of Okinawan Dialect.

University of the Ryukyus system

The system devised by , a section of University of the Ryukyus. Unlike others, this method is intended purely as a phonetic guidance, basically uses katakana only. For the sake of an easier comparison, corresponding hiragana are used in this article.

New Okinawan letters

新沖縄文字, devised by Yoshiaki Funazu, in his textbook Utsukushii Okinawa no Hōgen. The rule applies to hiragana only. Katakana is used as in Japanese; just like in the conventional usage of Okinawan.

Basic syllables and kai-yōon (palatalized syllables)

Gō-yōon (labialised syllables)

Others