Educated Not to Speak Our Language: Language Attitudes and Newspeakerness in the Yaeyaman Language

Abstract

The emergence of Indigenous language revitalization seeks to address historical domination over Indigenous peoples and to recover the loss of ancestral languages as embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper draws from long-term linguistic ethnographic research on one of the Indigenous Ryukyuan languages: Yaeyaman. I highlight one variety of Miyara Yaeyaman spoken in the village of Miyara on Ishigaki Island. Along with other Ryukyuan languages, it has been endangered and minoritized due to the suppression/assimilation policies following the dominant monolingual ideology in Japan. The aim of this research is to investigate existing theories of newspeakerness and language attitudes in sociolinguistic situations in Miyara and to attempt to examine prevailing ideologies. By using ethnographic data of Yaeyaman knowledge holders, I show that there is a lack of compatibility in language attitudes and beliefs between new speakers and traditional speakers of Miyaran. Through educational policy completely based on dominant values, Miyara community members are made to believe that our language is not sophisticated. Hence, we are “educated” not to speak our own language. As a conclusion, I present how language education policy in Japan—so far, a major cause of the problem of language endangerment—can become part of a possible solution to language endangerment.

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