The fieldwork was based on the interviews with Mr Fumio Kuninaka, a fully bilingual Japanese-Kurima speaker and one of the few fluent Kurima speakers born in the post-war period (for a detailed explanation of the Kurima sociolinguistic situation and language endangerment, cf. 1.2.4). Mr Kuninaka was born in 1951 on Kurima, where he resided with his multigenerational (parents and grandparents) family of origin until he moved to Miyako main island to start his high school education at the age of 15. Upon graduation, he subsequently moved to Shuri in Okinawa to study at the University of the Ryukyus. He became an elementary school teacher and since 1974 until his retirement, he spent all of his professional life moving from place to place as a contract teacher at schools all over Okinawa prefecture, including the Miyako islands, Okinawa main island, and Yonaguni, with an average three year contract period per school. After his retirement, Mr Kuninaka settled permanently back in Kurima, where he engages in farming on his own field. As a self-taught language documentalist, he is also actively involved in recording the language and popularizing the knowledge of the Kurima local language and culture, one facet of which has been his generous and tireless contribution to my fieldwork.
Growing up in a multigenerational household with essentially Miyako- monolingual grandparents, Mr Kuninaka had had an above-average opportunity as well as motivation to develop his Kurima language skills. The fact that electricity was only brought to Kurima households in late 1960s also favored familial interactions as a daily way to spend one’s time, without many distractions after dusk, not to mention the role of radio and television in the spread of standard Japanese (cf. Jarosz 2015: 170). These factors helped Mr Kuninaka develop an above-average affinity with and awareness of the Kurima topolect. Even so, he reports that even when he was a child, he already communicated with his peers in a mix of Kurima and code-switched Japanese. Today, he only uses Kurima in interactions with the generation of his parents, meaning people at least in their 80s, whereas in all other contexts, Japanese has become the main communication tool.
The main method of the fieldwork has been the elicitation interview, in which the speaker was asked to translate specific utterances from standard Japanese into Kurima. At the same time, the speaker was asked to comment on the vocabulary and structures used in the output utterances, and to explain why in the case some utterances or concepts appeared not translatable into Kurima. Apart from such individual utterances, the fieldwork also involves natural texts comprised of short monologues grounded in the Kurima sociolinguistic context; in those monologues, the speaker recounts the stories about his childhood neighbors (Texts 1, 2), provides an example of a toast speech (Text 3), explains the Miyako tradition of circle drinking (Text 4), and introduces a hypothetical monologue of a mother complaining about her lazy son (Text 5).
The fieldwork conducted directly in Kurima has not covered all aspects of the Kurima language system. Furthermore, the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic has prevented any plans of a follow-up study from coming to fruition. Under these circumstances, it has become even more instrumental that this description incorporates analyses also from the Kurima evidence extracted from other available sources. Needless to say, another merit of this approach has been that other sources involve records of the language of different speakers from different generations, of different genders and other sociolinguistic parameters, which ensures a more representative picture of the Kurima linguistic features and practices.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most important factor behind the decision to incorporate in the analysis the material previously recorded by other researchers has been the value of the data which in most cases has remained – sometimes for decades – unanalyzed or underanalyzed and not incorporated in any form of systemic description, released in publications with a limited circulation, and frequently confined to obscure research reports out of reach of the general public (like Sugimura 2003, Uchima 2004, and Nakasone et al. 1968). Combined with the endangerment and underdocumentation of the Kurima topolect, it is considered of paramount importance to employ any extant kind of documentation of the language, be it from recent or more distant past, and incorporate it into the description for the most complete picture of the language possible.1
Apart from the fieldwork, which remained the primary source and point of reference throughout the description, the sources used in the present volume have been: the audiovisual records of natural speech in Kurima in the form of Hayashi 2016 (a dialogue by three female residents of a Miyako nursing home)2 and Kurima 2017 (a speech contest performance by a relatively young female speaker, born in 1959), and the single-sentence utterances documented in phonetic notation with standard Japanese translations from the following research reports: Nohara (1998; three male and female speakers born in 1910, 1914 and 1923), Sugimura (2003; 15 male and female speakers born between 1914 and 1930), Uchima (2004; five female speakers born in 1912, 1917, 1921, 1923, and 1927). Also Nakasone et al. (1968, data from a speaker born around 1897), Shimoji (1979), Arazato (2003, data from three speakers born in 1907, 1919 and 1927) and Kibe (2012) were used as supplementary sources.
In each case of a glossed example cited from an external source, the source, together with the page number in the case of the written sources, has been explicitly indicated following the English translation of the example. No indication of a reference means that the example comes from my own fieldwork.
In the case of audiovisual sources, I transcribed and analyzed the linguistic material from scratch, although in the case of Hayashi (2016) I also compared the results against the original analysis available in the source. In the case of the written sources with no audio records available for verification, I retranscribed the data to make it consistent with the conventions adopted in my own description. In either case, the reliance on the attached standard Japanese translations has been limited to a minimum. In exceptional cases, the glossing of vocabulary with unclear or ambiguous meaning has been based on explanations from lexicographic sources on other Core Miyako topolects: Hirara (Nevskiy 1992, or Nevskiy 2015) and Irabu-Nakachi (Tomihama 2013).
The notations in the written sources which seemed to contradict the established audio material-based knowledge of the Kurima language system (such as the converb form of the verb ‘to eat’, which is invariably fai in numerous attestations in every source, written as ⟨fi⟩ in a single instance in Sugimura 2003: 39) have been arbitrarily considered notational or typographic errors and modified in accordance with the expected forms. Also constructions which have been observed to undergo fusion in natural-paced speech in my own fieldwork, such as progressive or resultative constructions (cf. 3.3.6.1, 3.3.6.2) have occasionally been presented as fused, e.g. ⟨nari uz⟩ → ⟨narjuːz⟩, as it is thought that in such cases, the original source notation faithfully reflects the morphological rather than phonological content of the utterance. Any inaccuracies and errors which could occur as a result of this approach are solely my own responsibility. Care has been taken to ensure that no such interventions with the source material affect the principal results of the description.
This situation is not unique to Kurima. It is estimated that for countless Ryukyuan and other Japonic topolects there are dozens or hundreds of pages’ worth of linguistic data, including natural texts as well as elicited, translation-based utterances, stored away in unanalyzed research reports, waiting to be used in a systemic description.
Although the age of the participants is not made explicit in the information attached to the video, one can estimate that they are at least in their eighties, which would make them born no later than ca. 1937.