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Paper short abstract

This paper examines a new-speaker-led Okinawan language revitalization initiative in Yomitan Village, framing revitalization as a relational practice through which new speakers rethink history, identity, and collective well-being.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines practices of language revitalization carried out in Yomitan Village through Uchinaaguchi Umui Project (Okinawan language feelings/thoughts project), a movement led by new speakers of the Okinawan language. The project was launched in 2022 by three new speakers, including the author, who initially connected through online Okinawan language study sessions.

The project emerged from a set of fundamental yet deeply rooted questions: Why are we, despite having been born and raised in Okinawa, unable to speak the Okinawan language? Why do we continue to feel that a language often described as no longer socially functional still matters to us? We, as new speakers, have continuously verbalized and shared these questions in Okinawan language, engaging in practices aimed at reclaiming their own language through interactions with family members and local community residents.

Rather than framing language revitalization solely as a pedagogical or policy-driven endeavor, this paper approaches it as a lived and relational practice embedded in everyday life. The analysis focuses on the effects of specific new-speaker-led practices introduced in this project on its core members and related participants, and is informed by the author’s positionality as an Uchinaanchu (Okinawan person), a new speaker actively involved in the movement, and a researcher reflecting from within the process.

This paper argues that language revitalization is not merely the recovery of linguistic competence. Rather, for new speakers, it constitutes a process of critically re-evaluating the social structures and historical conditions in which they are situated, from their own perspectives, and of reclaiming the capacity to imagine and create futures for themselves and their communities.　

Thus, language revitalization functions as a process through which new speakers reconstruct identity, reconfigure relationships with family and community, and cultivate forms of collective and relational well-being.