“Burajiru-Okinawa-Colonia-go” viewed from the Language Contact Theory P.O.V.

This paper analyses the Burajiru-Okinawa-Colonia-go (Brazilian-Okinawan community language), i.e., the language spoken in the Okinawan community of Brazil, from the Language Contact Theory point of view. In the Brazilian-Okinawan community, contact occurs between many regional dialects of Ryukyuan, the mainland Japanese dialects, the Japanese variation spoken by Okinawans, and naturally, with Brazilian- Portuguese. This linguistic contact causes (1) language change of the first-language (L1) due to lexical and grammatical borrowing, and (2) the birth of broken languages as a result of L1 influence in the process of second-language (L2) acquisition. First, in this paper, these two phenomena are examined through the analysis of the Ryukyuan, Japanese, and Portuguese spoken by the first and second generations. Second, this paper diagrams the language family tree of the Burajiru-Okinawa-Colonia-go. And finally, an attempt is made to classify it as pidgin, creole, interlanguage, or mixed language, by analyzing its linguistic and social characteristics