Talk:Miyakoan language

message: They even said 'around.'
*Yeah, and the figure seems bit too high. Current population of Miyakojima city is 56,285, meaning 99% of Miyakojima islanders can speak the dialect, if "55783" were really correct. Although I hope they could preserve their local speech that well, I highly doubt if that's the case. Local people under their 30s are generally monolingual in standard Japanese, and the immigrants from other parts of Japan surely make up more than 1% of the island population. Now looking at other articles, all the numbers of Ryūkyūan languages speakers seem too positive. Maybe we should put "citation needed" tags for all of them. Kzaral 23:13, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: How does this person know the exact amount of speakers?  

message: Sturmgewehr88, you reverted my edit with the comment that: "User:Kwamikagami added this, and languages have no borders".
1) What kind of argument from authority is the appeal to Kwamikagami? I speak French, too...
2) Sure, languages don't have borders like that. However... is a wolverine a character in an important story or something? Because otherwise, I have trouble imagining why Miyako would not only have a word for "wolverine", but borrow it apparently straight from medieval Chinese without Japanese as an intermediary.
David Marjanović (talk) 11:25, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That's OR. According to the source I used, gakspstu is "glouton". Also, Lewchew was once an independent kingdom with its own relations to China. — kwami (talk) 18:32, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

text: Kwami is a very active editor with extensive knowledge on this subject. Also, I don't know if wolverines have any cultural significance to these people, but giraffes don't naturally occur in England either. And to add to what Kwami pointed out below, the Sakishima Islands had been more in touch with China than Japan until very recently. ミーラー強斗武 (StG88ぬ会話) 21:26, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wolverine? 

message: Phonology is a fine place to start when describing a language, but I would like to see more about the grammar. Some basic typology with English-glossed example sentences would help readers get a sense of what the language is like. Using Google Translate, I can see the Japanese version of the article has some grammar information. Unfortunately, Google Translate mangles the technical linguistics terms on the page.
Also, the article asserts that Miyako is a language (語) of its own and not just a dialect (方言) of Japanese. The infobox on the Japanese article agrees with this classification as a separate language, despite the fact that the title of the Japanese article calls it a dialect. I assume this difference exists because "Miyako dialect" is the more common term and "Miyako language" is the more technically accurate term. 
If that's true, it would be nice to see examples of the features that made linguists classify it as a member of the Ryukyuan languages and Southern Ryukyuan languages specifically. Sure, sometimes the distinction between dialects and languages can be a bit fuzzy and can be mixed up with nationalism and ethnic pride. But I hope that Wikipedia can provide facts and explanations that experts in the field generally agree on.
75.137.100.122 (talk) 06:20, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar?