Kurima dialect

Kurima
Ffima-ftsɨ
Native to	Japan
Region	Kurima Island, Okinawa Prefecture
Native speakers	30~50 (2025)
Language family	Japonic Ryukyuan Southern Ryukyuan Miyakoan Kurima
Writing system	Japanese
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	kuri1272
Kurima is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Kurima (Ffima-ftsɨ) is a dialect of the Miyakoan language, a Ryukyuan language spoken on the island of Kurima, one of the Miyako Islands of Japan. As a moribund language, currently Kurima is only spoken natively by elderly people. It is recognized by UNESCO as a severely endangered language.

Location of Kurima within the Miyako Islands

Sociolinguistics

The offshore island of Kurima is inhabited by 161 people (as March 2021 per government report) with half of the population aged 65 or older and only 9 children. The island has been facing steep demographic decline over the last 40 years, dropping from 250 in 1983, to 161 in 2021. Severe depopulation forced the island's last education facility to close in 2020. Conservation and revitalization efforts often face difficult challenges as younger generations have increasingly shifted to Japanese while most of the current speakers are aged 50 and over, further enhancing the risk of extinction.

Phonology

Vowels

Kurima has six cardinal vowels /a, e, i, ɨ, u, o/ and their lengthened counterparts.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i iː	ɨ ɨː	u uː
Mid	e eː		o oː
Open		a aː

Diphthongs in Kurima are /ai/ and /ui/.

Consonants

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m			n
Fricative			f v	s z	ɕ ʑ			(h)
Affricate				ts dz	tɕ dʑ			(h)
Stop		p b		t d			k g
Flap				r
Approximant		w				j

Word stress

Stress in Kurima is highly pragmatic: it correlates with theme topicalization, H pitch occurs wherever lexical items that are considered topical of the discourse. Pitch is not specified at a lexical level. However, older reports from the 1960s described the Kurima accent system as stable and predictable one-pattern system but was shifting towards accentless type.

Compared to other Ryukyuan languages, Kurima has lost the three-way accent distinction of Proto-Ryukyuan as with most other varieties, except for Ikema, Minna, and Tarama, which preserve the contrast.

Morphosyntax

Like any other Japonic languages, Kurima word order in phrases is head-final SOV. As a dependent-head language, Kurima morphosyntax heavily relies on nominal case markings to define syntactic roles for certain arguments in the clause and relationship with the predicate.

In an intransitive clause, the subject argument occupies the preverbal position of the predicate.

fu-taːzz-a

two-person.CLF-TOP

ur-an

be-NEG.NPST

fu-taːzz-a ur-an

two-person.CLF-TOP be-NEG.NPST

'Those two are missing.'

In a transitive clause, the prototypical order is transitive subject/agent argument–object argument–predicate.

anna-a

mother-TOP

mainitsɨ-du

every.day-FOC

sɨmuttɕu-u

book-ACC

jum

read

anna-a mainitsɨ-du sɨmuttɕu-u jum

mother-TOP every.day-FOC book-ACC read

'My mom reads books every day.'

Infrequently, the object argument can be moved to the preceding position of the subject argument if the object is considered topical.

ku-nu

This-GEN

zzu-Ø-ba

fish-ACC-TOP

anna-ga-du

mother-Nom-FOC

fo-o

eat-NPST

ku-nu zzu-Ø-ba anna-ga-du fo-o

This-GEN fish-ACC-TOP mother-Nom-FOC eat-NPST

'As for this fish, it's mother that will eat it.'

Further reading

• Jarosz, Aleksandra (2024). Descriptive Grammar and Diachrony of Kurima: A Minority South Ryukyuan Language of the Miyako Islands. Brill. ISBN 978-9-00468-054-8.