We often like to think of Japanese as a language isolate. After all, it is the language we most often associate with being predominantly spoken in Japan. But as travelers to prefectures like Hokkaido and Okinawa would see, this is not quite the case. After all, Ainu is a language, and a language isolate, mainly spoken in Hokkaido today, though there have been speakers in Sakhalin Island up north in Russia.

Others might point towards the languages spoken in Okinawa and other small islands, called the Ryukyuan languages. These languages branched off from Japanese at some point in the history of the Japonic languages, leading to Japanese being technically not quite a language isolate, but more rather, a member of the Japonic language family. This, in a way, reminds me of the Jeju language spoken in South Korea, which is distinct from the Korean language, something we sort of long regarded as a language isolate, but now we could consider part of the Koreanic language family.

Today, we will look an interesting language called the Hachijō language, or the Shima Kotoba as referred to by speakers. In Japanese, this is referred to as 八丈方言, or Hachijō hōgen, which translates back to Hachijō dialects, suggesting that Japan treats Hachijō as a dialect of Japanese, as opposed to a separate language. However, Hachijõ is known to have dialects based on the villages found in the regions that speak it, so perhaps this is what the 方言 part might be referring to. In all fairness, the distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ is very much often blurred, but in the grand scheme of mutual intelligibility, Hachijõ might just be a distinct language of its own. This language is spoken in some islands south of Tokyo, most notably, Hachijō-jima and Aogashima, and the Daitō Islands in Okinawa.

However, speaker numbers vary by estimates. Some sources suggested that the Hachijō language has a few hundred speakers, while the Endangered Languages Project puts this estimate at fewer than 8000 speakers, using Thomas Dougherty’s 2014 publication as a source. What is common amongst them, though, is that the Hachijō language is an endangered language at best, and moribund at worst, and that obtaining precise numbers for native speakers is challenging, possibly due to the treatment of Hachijō as a Japanese dialect.

The Hachijõ language diverged from Japanese somewhat more recently — around the 8th century CE, from the variants of Japanese spoken in modern-day prefectures like Tokyo and Chiba, collectively known as Eastern Old Japanese. Modern-day Japanese developed from Central Old Japanese, and hence one might see how this divergence would result in the evolution of another Japanese language. Unlike some other Japanese dialects, Hachijõ retained some grammatical and phonetic features used in Eastern Old Japanese, and even shares some lexical features with the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the islands further south. In a way, this kind of parallels the pattern of evolution of Icelandic from Old Norse, in contrast to its other Scandinavian counterparts, although Hachijõ technically evolved from a separate variety of Old Japanese from Modern-day Standard Japanese.

Hachijõ largely has a similar phonological inventory and syllable structure with Standard Japanese, but has some interesting quirks that separate it from the Japanese that we are more familiar with. The sound /N/, represented by ん or ン, can form its own syllable. For instance, the word for ‘tasty’ could be translated as NNmakya (んんまきゃ) in Hachijõ, in contrast to うまい (umai) in Standard Japanese.

Hachijõ also distinguishes between three kinds of syllable weights, with light syllables having only a short vowel, heavy syllables having either a long vowel or a coda like /N/ but not both, and superheavy syllables having both a long vowel and a coda. This distinction governs some grammatical functions in Hachijõ, as superheavy syllables are generally not favoured, and cannot be found in many of its verbal conjugations. And when these would occur in a verb, these syllables will be converted to be a heavy syllable. Pronunciations of Hachijõ words vary from dialect to dialect, with some dialects even losing certain phonemes when they would otherwise appear in the middle of a word.

Having diverged from Japanese quite some time ago, we would expect Hachijõ to have noticeable sound changes or differences in the lexicons of Hachijõ and Standard Japanese today. And this expectation would be correct. While Hachijõ derives its words typically from sound changes from Eastern Old Japanese words, Standard Japanese today typically derives its words from Western and Central Old Japanese. Additionally, some Japanese words can refer to another thing in Hachijõ, as the word やま (yama) can translate to ‘mountain’ in Japanese, but ‘field’ in Hachijõ. ゴミ (gomi) translates to ‘trash’ in Japanese, but ‘firewood’ in Hachijõ, which kind of brings a weird vibe to the saying ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’.

This does not quite explain some Hachijõ words we see today which do not really have clear etymologies or known cognates with any known variant of Japanese. This includes words like かすをら (kasuwora), the verb ‘to forget’, which translates to 忘れる (wasureru) in Japanese. Some names for animals like cicada and fruits like strawberry are different too in Hachijõ, which translate to くつかわしめ (kutsukawashime) and あび (abi) respectively, instead of セミ (semi) and いちご (ichigo) in Japanese.

Hachijõ grammar also has its own quirks, although most of it is pretty much similar, or has similar counterparts, to Japanese and Ryukyuan grammars. For example, among the various pronouns to refer to ‘you’, even though such pronouns are usually dropped, you might encounter words like あなた (anata, sometimes contracted to anta in less formal speech), きみ (kimi), and おまえ (omae, sometimes also pronounced omee) in Japanese, with omae being among the least formal ones which might convey a rather derogatory connotation. But not in Hachijõ. Instead, most of these pronouns derive from omae, as omee, omi, and omai, going down the scale of formality. The Hachijõ equivalent of the Japanese omae is nare instead, which can also convey a similar connotation of derogation. And unlike Japanese, Hachijõ does not really have a formality distinction for the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’.

There are many Hachijõ particles that have Japanese cognates, but some include further uses for other grammatical functions. One example is the particle を (wo, but usually pronounced o), which marks the preceding noun or element as a direct object of whatever verb that comes at the end of the sentence. In some Hachijõ dialects though, this may also be pronounced something similar to a よ (yo). Additionally, this can also convey a sense of a speaker’s surprise or something unexpected to the speaker. However, this particle can also be attached to verbs to convey a speaker’s surprise of a certain action. So if I want to say “Whoa, how fast!” in Hachijõ, I would say something like “ai, haya-so-o!”. Many other aspects of its grammar can be found in the 2001 publication by Kaneda Akihiro titled 八丈方言動詞の基礎研究 (Basic Research on Verbs in the Hachijō Dialect), in Japanese, so if you could get your hands on a copy of that publication, that would be extremely informative.

For those who are interested in learning more about Hachijõ, there are lexical data in the Endangered Languages of Japan website, containing words from the Mitsune and Sueyoshi variants of Hachijõ. Many resources covering this language are in Japanese, but I will leave some publications and leaflets in Further Reading for you to check out anyway. Interestingly, there are also stamps and emotes one could purchase to use on the messenger application LINE, which feature some Hachijõ slang and expressions as well. And so, despite Hachijõ’s endangerment, there is still interest in studying how the language works, as well as incorporating it in social media and messaging applications for speakers to use.

Further Reading

Changes in the Hachijõ language (in Japanese):

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/gengo/142/0/142_119/_pdf

Example sentences in the Hachijõ language (with Japanese translation):

https://opac.ll.chiba-u.jp/da/curator/900022799/Sh-H0051.pdf

Cultural notes and some words in Hachijõ (in Japanese):
https://www.town.hachijo.tokyo.jp/kakuka/kyouiku/hachijo_hogen/H251101.pdf