Okinawan scripts

Okinawan, 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.

This article describes the modern Okinawan writing system. See the Okinawan language article for an overview of the language. For the writing systems in Ryukyuan languages in general, see the Ryukyuan languages article.

An example of traditional Okinawan writing circa 1471

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.[1] As a "dialect", modern Okinawan is not written frequently. When it is, the Japanese writing system is generally used in an ad hoc manner. There is no standard orthography for the modern language. Nonetheless, there are a few systems used by scholars and laypeople alike. None of them are widely used by native speakers, but represent 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.