HOW CAN WE CHOOSE AN ORTHOGRAPHY FOR OKINAWAN? Adapting the concepts of acceptability and usability to assist Okinawan orthography development

Abstract

Okinawan, one of the Ryukyuan languages, is in the process of being replaced by Japanese. While there are ongoing revitalization efforts, large-scale education has yet to be introduced. One hindrance to this is the lack of a standard orthography, causing anything written in the language to differ greatly depending on the author. In this thesis, whether Cahill’s (2018) theory of orthography acceptability and usability should be adapted as a framework for the development of a standard Okinawan orthography was assessed by examining how the glottal stop and soft vowel onset, a phonemic pair not existing in Standard Japanese, is represented in Okinawan educational materials. For acceptability assessment, a dictation task with a native Okinawan was carried out. In addition to this, the orthographies of the two beginner level teaching materials of Okinawan, Shokyuu Okinawago (Hanazono 2020) and Shimakutuba Dokuhon -Chuugakusei- (Miyagi 2021), were analyzed. The acceptability of the orthographies was analyzed with the help of an interview with the informant, and the usability by step-by-step analysis. In this study the importance of using the concepts of acceptability and usability together was confirmed; orthography conventions that were suitable from the viewpoint of usability were still rejected due to acceptability factors, and vice versa. By using both concepts a wide discussion was achieved and potential points of conflict between the two were successfully discovered, allowing for the pinpointing of areas that need further study.