Product Description

The Okinawan-English Wordbook, written by the late Mitsugu Sakihara, historian and native speaker of the Naha dialect of Okinawa, is an all-new concise dictionary of the modern Okinawan language with definitions and explanations in English. The first substantive Okinawan-English lexicon in more than a century, it represents a much-needed addition to the library of reference materials on the language. The Wordbook opens to lay user and linguist alike an area heretofore accessible almost exclusively in Japanese works and adds to the general body of scholarship on various Ryukyuan languages and dialects by providing a succinct but comprehensive picture of modern colloquial Okinawan.

The Okinawan language as recorded in the Wordbook is that of the inhabitants of the southern third of the main island of the Ryukyuan archipelago, which stretches southwest from the Japanese island of Kyushu toward Taiwan. It melds the gentry language of the old capital, Shuri, with the popular language of commercial Naha and the various localisms of other villages of southern Okinawa. It is also the heritage language of substantial communities descended from emigrants to Hawaii, South America, and elsewhere in the past century. The current work comprises nearly 10,000 entries, many with encyclopedic discussion, drawn from a wide variety of sources in addition to the author’s native knowledge and from numerous areas of interest, with emphasis on the cultural traditions of Okinawa. Entries reflect both contemporary Naha usage and archaisms and areal variants when these are of cultural, historical, or linguistic interest. Thus, in addition to being a comprehensive portrait of the modern Okinawan language, the Wordbook serves as an implicit introduction to the rich field of Japanese dialect studies.

Prefatory material discusses the phonology of Okinawan and the romanization scheme employed in the book, with particular attention to phonological features of the language likely to be unfamiliar to native English speakers and those acquainted only with Japanese. A general introduction to the conjugation of verbs and adjectives in Okinawan is made as well.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115442 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 309 pages

About the Author
Mitsugu Sakihara (1928-2001) taught in the Department of History at the University of Hawai'i in various capacities from 1971 to 2001 and was also professor and president of Hawaii International College. A specialist in Okinawan history, his other works include A Short History of Early Okinawa based on the Omoro Sô shi(1987), an afterword to the revised edition of George H. Kerr's Okinawa: The History of an Island People, and numerous articles and monographs on the economic and sociopolitical history of the Ryukyuan kingdom and Okinawa prefecture. The Okinawan-English Wordbookis based on a dictionary Professor Sakihara compiled over twenty years while living and teaching in Hawai'i.

Customer Reviews

A Perfect Window on an Oft-Forgotten Language
I discovered this treasure of a book through my public library, and when I found it available for sale on Amazon I immediately purchased a copy. To clarify, this book is a well-detailed dictionary on the words of the native language(s) of the Ryukyu islands (of which Okinawa is the best well-known). This book is truly a dictionary - it translates and summarizes the meaning of each word and even gives the Japanese equivalent of each word if one is available - and it briefly teaches how each word is used when speaking the language. (If you're looking to actually learn to speak the Okinawan language, this book is a good start and a great reference and teaching tool, but it would be best to learn primarily from another source when it comes to verb tenses and sentence structure.) The Okinawan section is naturally larger and more comprehensive than its English counterpart, and it includes the names and descriptions of rituals, birds, plant life, and foods found in the Ryukyu islands. Well written and easy to understand, this book is perfect for anyone who loves the amazing culture and language of Okinawa and the other Ryukyu islands.