Making Digital Lexicon of Okinawan

Okinawan is a language of the North Ryukyuan languages belonging to the Japonic language family, spoken mainly on the main island of Okinawa. The Okinawan Dictionary published by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (1963, 9th printing in 2001) uses the Latin alphabet, supplemented with several special phonetic symbols such as glottal stops. Okinawan has been written in a variety of forms up to the present day, including mixed kanji/hiragana, katakana, romaji, and hiragana only. In this "Okinawan Dictionary Online" project, first, we have examined the orthographic and spelling systems used up to now, and standardized them by determining the standard Kanji-Hiragana mixed spelling system. Next, we added the standardized Kanji-Hiragana hybrid notation, Hiragana notation, and International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to the spreadsheet data (XSLX) of the dictionary already created by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics and converted the data to TEI XML, a global standard for text structuring. The XML was then transformed into a web application using Hugo, a static website generator. This paper discusses the achievements and challenges of the "Okinawan Dictionary Online" to date.