An Introduction to Ryukyuan Languages

AAILCAA, 2011. — 259 p.Ryukyuan is a group of languages belonging to the Japonic Family, spoken in the southern extreme of Japan archipelago called the Ryūkyū Islands.
This book, entitled An Introduction to Ryukyuan Languages (irl), is a collection of grammatical sketches of six Ryukyuan languages: Ura and Yuwan (Amami Ryukyuan), Tsuken (Okinawan), Ikema and Ogami (Miyako Ryukyuan), and Hateruma (Yaeyama Ryukyuan). The target readers of irl are not limited to specialists of Ryukyuan; irl is open to both specialists and non-specialists including theoretical linguists, typologists, and linguists working on non-Ryukyuan languages. In fact, irl is deliberately organized in such a way that common typological topics likely to be asked by a non-specialist of a given language (e.g. word order, case alignment, morphological typology, property-concept encoding,etc.) are addressed by all authors (see § 3 of this introduction for more detail). Irl is, literally, an introduction to Ryukyuan languages.