1. Introduction Miyakoan, or Miyako-Ryukyuan, is a minority language of Japan curren- tly spoken by an estimated number of 12,000~22,000 people in the Miyako islands (for detailed estimates cf. Jarosz 2015: 161–162). It is a member of the Japonic language family with Japanese as its biggest and dominant representa- tive. Apart from Japanese, all Japonic languages – UNESCO/Moseley (2010) distinguishes seven such entities – are endangered and have no oicial status of minority languages on the level of state legislature. Indeed, in Japan these languages are still often labeled by default as hōgen, “dialects” of Japanese. Miyakoan belongs to the Sakishima/Southern subgroup of the Ryuky- uan group within the Japonic family, its closest relatives being the two Macro-Yaeyama (Pellard 2015) languages, Yaeyama and Yonaguni/Dunan. Like most Ryukyuan ethnolects, it is not a language used in literacy. It also has few written records from the pre-World War II period, which coincides with the pre-endangerment period in the history of the language. Although the number and quality of research and publications on Miyakoan has ra- pidly increased over the last decades and especially post-2000, both its documentation and description remain insuicient as evaluated by Aso, Shimoji and Heinrich (2014) with the employment of the UNESCO (2003) language vitality assessment scale. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a selected aspect of Miyakoan language system and in so doing, to disseminate results of this author’s re- search, providing non-specialists of Ryukyuan linguistics with an occasion to become familiar with a speciic topic in Miyakoan studies. The paper will describe Miyakoan from a single angle, and namely its lexical class of adjectives. The description, unless explicitly stated otherwise, Kwartalnik Językoznawczy 2015/1-2 DOI: 10.14746/kj.2015.1-2.1 Aleksandra Jarosz Adjectives and adjectival derivates in Miyako-Ryukyuan