Editing Okinawan language (section)

== Sociolinguistics ==
UNESCO listed six Okinawan language varieties as endangered languages in 2009.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00206|title=Interactive atlas of the world's languages in danger|last=UNESCO|date=2009}}</ref> The endangerment of Okinawan is largely due to the shift to Standard Japanese. Throughout history, Okinawan languages have been treated as dialects of Standard Japanese. For instance, in the 20th century, many schools used "dialect tags" to punish the students who spoke in Okinawan.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Heinrich|first=Patrick|date=2005|title=Language loss and revitalization in the Ryukyu Islands|journal=The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus}}</ref> Consequently, many of the remaining speakers today are choosing not to transmit their languages to younger generations due to the stigmatization of the languages in the past.<ref name=":0" />

There have been several revitalization efforts made to reverse this language shift. However, Okinawan is still poorly taught in formal institutions due to the lack of support from the Okinawan Education Council: education in Okinawa is conducted exclusively in Japanese, and children do not study Okinawan as their second language at school. As a result, at least two generations of Okinawans have grown up without any proficiency in their local languages both at home and school.<ref name=":0" />

Okinawan vocabulary is about 39% lexically similar with Japanese <ref>{{cite web|title=Linguistic Comparison in Vocabulary for Japanese to Understand Okinawan|first=Miyairi|last=Shuhei|year=2024|doi=10.5281/zenodo.13969333|url=https://zenodo.org/records/13969333}}</ref> and The Okinawan language is only 71% lexically similar to, or cognate with, standard Japanese. Even the southernmost Japanese dialect ([[Kagoshima dialect]]) is only 72% cognate with the northernmost Ryukyuan language (Amami). The Kagoshima dialect of Japanese, however, is 80% lexically similar to Standard Japanese.<ref>沖縄語辞典 (''Okinawan dictionary''). "前書き" (Preface). 国立国語研究所 1998.</ref>