The Uchinaaguchi class opened with a "good morning."
"Ukimi soo chii," said the teacher, Chogi Higa.
"Ukimi soo chii," the students repeated.
For student Tokie Koyama, the greeting was a bittersweet echo of her childhood on Okinawa.
"It makes me cry," she told the class. "I miss home."
Famous for its military bases and World War II battlefields, the Japanese island chain of Okinawa is also home to a language as different from Japanese as English is from German. A Japanese speaker in Higa's class would be lost from the get-go — "good morning" in Japanese is "ohayo gozai masu."
These days, the lingua franca of the Okinawan islands is Japanese, not Uchinaaguchi. Higa's students are studying a dying language. But for them, it is a language full of emotional triggers, conjuring up parents who used it so their children wouldn't understand, or grandparents thrilled to hear the younger generation speak a few words in the mother tongue.
The youngest student is in high school; the oldest, an octogenarian. Most are second-, third- or fourth-generation Okinawan Americans, though a few are drawn by an interest in island music and culture. Twice a month, they greet each other with a "Hai sai" and wrestle with such phrases as "Uganjuu-yamiseemi" — "How are you?" — that are tongue twisters for English and Japanese speakers alike. Higa's Gardena classroom is perhaps the only place in the continental United States to learn Uchinaaguchi.
"Being Okinawan is so different from being just pure Japanese, though of course, I'm American first," said Joan Oshiro, 68. Oshiro is fluent in Japanese but heard only snippets of Uchinaaguchi growing up in Hawaii. "Spanish may be more practical, but this is a way to learn a little bit about yourself and pass it on to your children."
Higa remembers wearing a wooden plaque labeled "dialect user" as punishment for speaking Uchinaaguchi at school — a common memory for older Okinawans. In the postwar years, mainstream radio and television programs in Japanese saturated the airwaves. Bombarded by these influences, Okinawans didn't pass their language to the next generation. Japanese became the language of the home, the school and the workplace.
In the islands, elderly Okinawans still shoot the breeze with one another in Uchinaaguchi. The folk music wafting out of open pub doors is still sung in the old tongue. But the language needs help to survive. Revival efforts in recent years have included speech contests and radio programs. Thousands of miles away in Southern California, Higa is doing his part.
For many years, he hosted an Uchinaaguchi program on a Los Angeles Japanese-language radio station. He has been teaching the Uchinaaguchi class, open to members of the Okinawa Assn. of America, for more than a decade. Between the two sessions, he has about 40 students.
"The performing arts are very popular. Young people are taking Okinawan dance, learning folk songs, the sanshin, but they don't know the language of the songs," said Higa, 72. "We're trying to educate those born here, so they can carry on Okinawan culture."
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Uchinaaguchi is believed to have split from Japanese between the 2nd and 8th centuries. It contains archaic traits, such as the consonant "p," that no longer exist in modern Japanese. The long "o" in Japanese is a long "u" in Uchinaaguchi, and the letter "e" often becomes "i."
Some words are similar. Sensei — teacher in Japanese — is shinshii in Uchinaaguchi.
But arigato — thank you — is nifee-deebiru. The word for "goodbye" in Japanese, sayonara, is guburii-sabira in Okinawan.
There are almost as many variants of the Okinawan language as there are islands in the Okinawan chain. Some are nearly as different from one another as they are from Japanese. UNESCO's list of endangered languages includes five from Japan's southernmost islands — Kunigami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni in addition to Uchinaaguchi.
Shoichi Iwasaki, an applied linguistics professor at UCLA, is studying Ikema, spoken on the Miyako islands in southern Okinawa. He and several colleagues are compiling a dictionary, even as they realize that the language is unlikely to survive.
Uchinaaguchi, on the other hand, has a chance. It is the language of the main Okinawan island. If nothing else, it will live on in the lyrics of popular songs, much as Cajun French does through Louisiana-born musicians like Wayne Toups and Michael Doucet.
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