Okinawan writing system

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. However, after Japan annexed the kingdom, the language was labeled as the "dialect" of Standard Japanese, and punished in schools through the use of "dialect cards". 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 language is not written frequently. When it is, the Japanese writing system is generally used with an ad hoc manner. There is no standard orthography for the modern language. Nonetheless, there are a few systems announced by scholars and lay-people alike. None of them are widespread among the native speakers, but those systems can write 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.

The modern conventional ad hoc spellings found in Okinawa.

The system devised by the Council for the Dissemination of Okinawan Dialect (沖縄方言普及協議会). [1]

The system devised by Okinawa Center of Language Study, 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.

新沖縄文字 (Shin Okinawa-moji), devised by Yoshiaki Funazu (船津好明, Funazu Yoshiaki^?), in his textbook Utsukushii Okinawa no Hougen (美しい沖縄の方言; "The beautiful Okinawan Dialect"; ). The rule applies to hiragana only. Katakana is used as in Japanese; just like in the conventional usage of Okinawan.

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