30% OFF OKINAWA LANGUAGE AND HISTORY

Posted on by UH Press

ICHARIBA CHOODEE!

Meet Niko, an exchange student, and his Okinawan host family. Together they provide a friendly introduction to Okinawan culture and language through conversations about everyday life and their adventures around Okinawa.

LOOK INSIDE

Learn Okinawan through engaging dialogues incorporating vocabulary, exercises, applications, grammar lessons, and review exercises. Cultural notes touch on history, geography, religion and pop culture.

FREE ONLINE ACCESS TO AUDIO RECORDINGS AND ANSWER KEYS

QR codes throughout the text instantly link to recordings of the dialogues, so learners can hear the language spoken by Okinawans. The website also contains the answers to the exercises.

NEWS ABOUT THE BOOK

UH Mānoa alums help to revive Okinawan language . . . “In a story of both serendipity and shared passion, two University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumni, Shoichi Iwasaki and Rumiko Shinzato, reunited after more than thirty years to co-author Basic Okinawan: From Conversation to Grammar, the first textbook of its kind for English speakers.”

LOOKING FOR MORE OKINAWA LANGUAGE AND HISTORY?

OKINAWAN-ENGLISH WORDBOOK

The Okinawan-English Wordbook, written by the late Mitsugu Sakihara, historian and native speaker of the Naha dialect of Okinawa, is a concise dictionary of the modern Okinawan language with definitions and explanations in English. The first substantive Okinawan-English lexicon in more than a century, it represents a much-needed addition to the library of reference materials on the language.

EARLY RYUKYUAN HISTORY: A NEW MODEL

The Ryukyu islands have been inhabited by humans for over 30,000 years. Their modern population, however, did not come from stone-age ancestors, nor did distinctive forms of Ryukyuan culture, such as sacred groves or stone-walled castles, emerge from within the islands. Instead, different groups of people lived in the Ryukyu islands at various points in history. Starting with the earliest extant human remains and ending with the formation of a centralized state in the early 1500s, Early Ryukyuan History traces the people, culture, technologies, goods, and networks that entered different parts of Ryukyu over time. In the process, it synthesizes decades of research in archaeology and anthropology, recent advances in genetic evidence, and conventional documentary sources to advance a new model for the early development of the Ryukyu islands, thoroughly rewriting early Ryukyuan history.

MENU