Abstract
The object of this paper is to introduce a prototype of the Digital Museum Project in our attempt at the documentation of Ikema, one of the endangered dialects of Southern Ryukyuan, spoken on Miyakojima Island, Okinawa, Japan. The language is no longer acquired by younger people, and is spoken fluently only by people in their 60's or older. We have been studying one of the dialects of the language spoken in Nishihara since January 2006, and have made recordings of natural discourse and elicitation sessions totaling over 500 hours. The local people, especially the senior generations, are deeply concerned about the imminent disappearance of their language and culture, and have been making every effort to pass them on to younger generations. Their enthusiasm culminated in the creation of a vernacular musical titled Nishihara Muradate (The Making of Nishihara Village), depicting their migration to Nishihara from the Ikema Island, their ancestral island in 1874. It was performed in July 2007, at the 45th anniversary of the foundation of Midorikai, the local senior members club, with about a hundred people participating in the performance. It was filmed by Miyako Television, a local broadcasting station, and was made into a DVD. Attempts at documenting the language are also being made by a nursery school principal, who has written fairy tales for children, scored traditional songs, and collected proverbs about raising children, all prepared bilingually in Ikema and the standard Japanese. We will introduce a digital museum, a web-based digital storage space that we are constructing to store the recordings we have made and to make the works accomplished by local people accessible to the public.
