Abstract
This exploratory qualitative study examines the language ideology, attitudes and practices displayed by research participants in the Arakawa and Ishigaki districts of Ishigaki City, Okinawa Prefecture. It will examine how native speakers and learners of the indigenous Yaeyama language (an endangered Southern Ryukyuan language) respond to, and adapt, the Master-Apprentice language learning model – a novel model for endangered language revitalization pioneered by Dr. Leanne Hinton of University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the NGO Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) in the 1990s. The findings from this community-level grassroots initiative are presented in a participatory action research (PAR) framework. PAR was selected as the framework because it emphasizes the cooperative nature of social science research, in which researchers are “practitioners” or “catalysts” and participants are “stakeholders” (Stringer 2014). The findings will have implications for language revitalization in other communities around the world in contexts of minority language endangerment which are similar to the Yaeyama Islands, and to the Ryukyu Islands at large.
