The Yamato people (大和民族 Yamato-minzoku?) are the dominant native ethnic group of Japan. It is a term that came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the residents of the mainland Japan from other minority ethnic groups who have resided in the peripheral areas of Japan such as Ainu, Ryukyuans, Nivkhs, Uilta, as well as Koreans, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese aborigines who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century. The name "Yamato" comes from the Yamato Court that existed in Japan in the 4th century. It was originally the name of the region where the Yamato people first settled in Nara Prefecture. In the 6th century, the Yamato people founded a state modeled on the Chinese states of Sui and Tang which were the most advanced polities in Asia at the time. As the Yamato's influence expanded on the island, their language replaced Old Japanese becoming the common spoken language. Ryukyuan, the languages of the Okinawa Islands, split from Old Japanese somewhere between the 3rd and 5th centuries. There is however a controversy on whether to include the Ryukyuans in the Yamato, or identify them as an independent ethnic group, or as a sub-group that constitutes Japanese ethnicity together with the Yamato because of close similarities suggested by genetics and linguistics. Shinobu Origuchi (折口信夫) argues that Ryukyuans are the "proto-Japanese" (原日本人), whereas Kunio Yanagita suggests that they were a part of the ancestors of the Japanese who came from the south and parted at the Ryukyu Islands from the rest who eventually reached the Japanese archipelago and became the Yamato.
