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Language Lineage

Hachijō

A small language of the Izu Islands that preserves features of Eastern Old Japanese, known from the 8th-century eastern poems of the Man'yōshū.

c. 1st millennium CE – presentHachijō-jima and Aogashima in the Izu Islands, about 300 km south of Tokyo
On this page
  1. An Eastern Survivor
  2. Old Endings, New Islands
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

An Eastern Survivor

Hachijō is spoken by a few hundred mostly elderly people on Hachijō-jima and Aogashima. It keeps grammatical forms, such as certain verb and adjective endings, that match the Eastern Old Japanese of the Man'yōshū's eastern poems. That makes it the only surviving descendant of eastern Old Japanese, and a separate language from standard Japanese. In the Edo period Hachijō-jima was a place of exile. Today the young speak standard Japanese, and in 2009 UNESCO listed Hachijō as definitely endangered.

02

Old Endings, New Islands

What sets Hachijō apart from Japanese is visible in its grammar. Where Japanese adjectives end in -i before a noun (takai 'high'), Hachijō uses -ke, the same ending found in the eastern poems of the Man'yōshū, where the western court language had -ki. Verbs likewise take an attributive ending -o or -ro, matching Eastern Old Japanese, where the western standard and modern Japanese have -u or -ru. No other living variety keeps these eastern forms so consistently, and on the test of mutual intelligibility linguists such as David Iannucci treat Hachijō as a separate Japonic language.

The language is not uniform. The villages of Hachijō-jima have their own dialects, with Sueyoshi standing apart from the rest, and Aogashima, a small volcanic island to the south, is different again. A variety was also spoken on Hachijō-kojima until that island was abandoned in 1969.

Hachijō also travelled. Settlers from Hachijō-jima colonised the uninhabited Daitō Islands, far to the south-west in what is now Okinawa Prefecture, from 1900, and a form of Hachijō is still heard there alongside Okinawan and Japanese.

Since at least 2009 the town of Hachijō has supported primary-school classes, karuta card games and theatre in the language, but it is not being passed on at home.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Japana few hundred

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 1st millennium CEContested

    An eastern branch in the islands

    A variety descended from Eastern Old Japanese reaches the Izu Islands and develops in isolation. When the islands were settled, and how directly Hachijō descends from the Man'yōshū's eastern dialects, are debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Frellesvig, Bjarke. 2010. A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Contact20th century – 2009

    Standard Japanese takes over

    Schooling and media in standard Japanese end the transmission of Hachijō to children. UNESCO lists it as definitely endangered in 2009, and local classes and materials now try to keep it alive.

    Sources (1)
    • Moseley, Christopher, ed. 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, 3rd ed. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.