and Tourism, provides administratively-oriented names. A geographical area that roughly corresponds to the Okinawa Guntō is referred to as Okinawa Shotō by the GSI. The two government organs are working on standardizing the names for large geographical entities and their extents. The geographical extent of the Okinawa Islands coincides with those of some taxonomic units proposed in a variety of humanities disciplines. For example, Okinawan is a subgroup of Northern Ryukyuan (Amami–Okinawan) languages, with the other subgroup being Amami. The speakers of the Okinawan subgroup concentrate in the Okinawa Islands if modern emigrants are not counted. While some propose a hypothetical subgrouping of Southern Amami–Northern Okinawan and thereby reject the unity of Okinawan, Pellard (2015) re-evaluates the traditional two-way division from a novel phylogenetic point of view. To complicate matters, the third edition of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Extinction (2009) unilaterally gave the name of Okinawan to a dialect cluster occupying the "central and southern parts of Okinawa Island and neighbouring islands". In the linguistic literature, however, this subgroup is commonly known as Central Okinawan, South–Central Okinawan, or South Okinawan. These abstract geographical entities were recognized independently of the local populations. In fact, people of Kume Island, which is part of the Okinawa Islands, maintain a strong notion that they are not Okinawans. Okinawa Prefecture The geographical extent of Okinawa was expanded in a similar manner when the Japanese Empire annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom and established Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. The Meiji government generally avoided retaining the names of old provinces and instead named new first-class administrative divisions after cities or districts where the administration offices were located. For some reason, however, the southwesternmost prefecture of the empire was named after an island. Both contemporary and modern scholars speculate that the Meiji government disfavored the name of Ryūkyū for its Chinese origin because it remained cautious about China's territorial ambitions in Okinawa. With the modern prefecture, the semantic domain of Okinawa has extended to Okinawa's southern neighbors, the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands, which are collectively referred to by the Okinawa-centric name of the Sakishima Islands. There is an asymmetry in the process of embracing this new notion in daily life. On the one hand, people on Okinawa Island, younger generations in particular, tend to take it for granted that Okinawa (including its dialectal form ʔucinaa) covers the Yaeyamas. On the other hand, people on