Overview

Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.

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Aleksandra Jarosz is a Japanologist and Ryukyuanist focusing on historical-comparative linguistics and language documentation. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2016 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Currently she is associate professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Recent publications include Demography, trade and state power: a tripartite model of medieval farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyu Islands (2022, co-authored with Mark Hudson et al.), Common Kyushu-Ryukyuan substratum in maritime vocabulary: a preliminary analysis (2023, co-authored with Georg Orlandi), and The syncretism of passive and potential marking in Japonic seen through modern South Ryukyuan languages (2023).

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