« Ces dialectes aussi sont des langues » : la transmission des connaissances sur la diversité linguistique au Japon

Only a decade ago, when you did a Google search for the language varieties of the Ryukyu Islands, you would be redirected to the Wikipedia page for "Ryukyu dialects," which contained very little information and existed in only a few languages. At the time of writing this article in the fall of 2022, the Wikipedia page for "Ryukyu languages" was available in 46 different languages. The last page to switch from the term "dialect" to "language" was the Japanese page. This change in linguistic terminology reflects the reconceptualization of the Ryukyu Islands, and their relationship with mainland Japan. In this article, I examine the spread of new terminology referring to language varieties in the Ryukyu archipelago. Thus, attention will be paid to the agents of this diffusion and the ideological aims of their activities. These are part of an international knowledge transfer that brings about an alignment about linguistic diversities in Japan between the interior and exterior of the country. To explore this alignment of ideologies on linguistic diversity, I will first discuss the terminology and key concepts used in this article, then I will analyze this knowledge transfer and its main agents before analyzing the sociopolitical consequences of this reconceptualization of Ryukyu languages.