Ainu language

Ainu (/ˈaɪnuː/;^[4] Ainu: アイヌ・イタㇰ Aynu=itak; Japanese: アイヌ語 Ainu-go) or Hokkaido Ainu is the sole survivor of the Ainu languages. It is spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

Until the 20th century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. There were at least 19 dialects of the Ainu languages. Only the Hokkaido variant survives, the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu having died in 1994. Hokkaido Ainu is moribund, though attempts are being made to revive it.

Ainu has no generally accepted genealogical relationship to any other language family. (For the most frequent proposals, see Ainu languages.)

Speakers

Pirka Kotan Museum, an Ainu language and cultural center in Sapporo (Jozankei area)

Depending on the classification system used, Ainu could be considered a moribund language or a critically endangered language. As of 2016, Ethnologue lists Ainu as class 8b: "nearly extinct."^[5] It has been endangered since before the 1960s. Most of the approximately 15,000 ethnic Ainu in Japan speak only Japanese. During the 1980s, in the town of Nibutani (part of Biratori, Hokkaido), where many of the remaining native speakers live, there were 100 speakers, of whom only fifteen used the language every day.

Today, there are only around ten native speakers remaining, all of whom are at least 80 years old. There are also some semi-speakers who are at least 60 years old. Most of these speakers live in southwestern Hokkaido.^[6]

Revitalization

There is an active movement to revitalize the language, mainly in Hokkaido but also elsewhere. Ainu oral literature has been documented both in hopes of safeguarding it for future generations, as well as using it as a teaching tool for language learners.^[6] Beginning in 1987, the Ainu Association of Hokkaido began hosting Ainu language classes, and have released instructional materials on the language, including a textbook.^[6]

Due to the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997, Ainu dictionaries transformed and became tools for improving communication and preserving records of the Ainu language in order to revitalize the language and promote the culture.^[7] There is now an increasing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaido, in large part due to the pioneering efforts of the late Ainu folklorist, activist and former Diet member Shigeru Kayano, himself a native speaker. The Ainu Association of Hokkaido is the main supporter of Ainu culture in Hokkaido. Ainu language classes have been conducted in some areas in Japan and small numbers of young people are learning Ainu. Efforts have also been made to produce web-accessible materials for conversational Ainu because most documentation of the Ainu language focused on the recording of folktales.^[8]

Phonology

Ainu syllables are CV(C), that is, they have an obligatory syllable onset and an optional syllable coda. There are few consonant clusters.

Vowels

There are five vowel sounds in Ainu:

Consonants

Plosives /p t ts k/ may be voiced [b d dz ɡ] between vowels and after nasals. Both /ti/ and /tsi/ are realized as [t͡ʃi], and /s/ becomes [ʃ] before /i/ and at the end of syllables. There is some variation among dialects; in the Sakhalin dialect, syllable-final /p, t, k, r/ lenited and merged into /x/. After an /i/, this /x/ is pronounced [ç]. A glottal stop [ʔ] is often inserted at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel, but is non-phonemic.

There is a pitch accent system. The accentuation of specific words varies somewhat from dialect to dialect. Generally, words including affixes have a high pitch on the stem, or on the first syllable if it is closed or has a diphthong, while other words have the high pitch on the second syllable, although there are exceptions to this generalization.

Typology and grammar

Typologically, Ainu is similar in word order (and some aspects of phonology) to Japanese.

Ainu has a canonical word order of SOV,^[9] and it uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Nouns can cluster to modify one another; the head comes at the end. Verbs, which are inherently either transitive or intransitive, accept various derivational affixes. Ainu does not have grammatical gender. Plurals are indicated by a suffix.^[9]

Classical Ainu, the language of the yukar, is polysynthetic, with incorporation of nouns and adverbs; this is greatly reduced in the modern colloquial language.

Applicatives may be used in Ainu to place nouns in the dative, instrumental, comitative, locative, allative, or ablative roles. Besides freestanding nouns, these roles may be assigned to incorporated nouns, and such use of applicatives is in fact mandatory for incorporating oblique nouns. Like incorporation, applicatives have grown less common in the modern language.

Ainu has a closed class of plural verbs, and some of these are suppletive.

Writing

The Ainu language is written in a modified version of the Japanese katakana syllabary. There is also a Latin-based alphabet in use. The Ainu Times publishes in both. In the Latin orthography, /ts/ is spelled c and /j/ is spelled y; the glottal stop, [ʔ], which only occurs initially before accented vowels, is not written. Other phonemes use the same character as the IPA transcription given above. An equals sign (=) is used to mark morpheme boundaries, such as after a prefix. Its pitch accent is denoted by acute accent in Latin script (e.g., á). This is usually not denoted in katakana.

Rev. John Batchelor was an English missionary who lived among the Ainu, studied them and published many works on the Ainu language.^[10][11] Batchelor wrote extensively, both works about the Ainu language and works in Ainu itself. He was the first to write in Ainu and use a writing system for it.^[12] Batchelor's translation of the New Testament was published in Yokohama in 1897 by a joint committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the American Bible Society, and the National Bible Society of Scotland. Other books written in Ainu include dictionaries, a grammar, and books on Ainu culture and language.^[13]

Special katakana for the Ainu language

A Unicode standard exists for a set of extended katakana (Katakana Phonetic Extensions) for transliterating the Ainu language and other languages written with katakana.^[14] These characters are used to write final consonants and sounds that cannot be expressed using conventional katakana. The extended katakana are based on regular katakana and either are smaller in size or have a handakuten. As few fonts yet support these extensions, workarounds exist for many of the characters, such as using a smaller font with the regular katakana ク ku to produce ク to represent the separate small katakana glyph ㇰ ku used as in アイヌイタㇰ (Aynu itak).

This is a list of special katakana used in transcribing the Ainu language. Most of the characters are of the extended set of katakana, though a few have been used historically in Japanese, and thus are part of the main set of katakana. A number of previously proposed characters have not been added to Unicode as they can be represented as a sequence of two existing codepoints.

Basic syllables

Diphthongs

Final [j] is spelled y in Latin, small ィ in katakana. Final [ʊ] is spelled w in Latin, small ゥ in katakana. [ae] is spelled ae, アエ, or アェ.

Example with initial k:

Since the above rule is used systematically, some katakana combinations have different sounds from conventional Japanese.

Long vowels

There are long vowels in the Sakhalin dialect. Either a circumflex or macron is used in the Latin alphabet, and the long vowel sign (ー) is used in katakana.

Example with initial k:

Oral literature

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of hero-sagas called yukar, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms. Yukar was memorized and told at get togethers and ceremonies that often lasted hours or even days. The Ainu also have another form of narrative often used called "Uepeker", which was used in the same contexts.

See also

• Ainu music
• Kannari Matsu
• Kyōsuke Kindaichi
• Bronisław Piłsudski

Notes

1. ↑ Ainu language at Ethnologue (8th ed., 1974). Note: Data may come from an earlier edition.
2. ↑ D. Bradley, "Languages of Mainland South-East Asia," in O. Miyaoka, O. Sakiyama, and M. E. Krauss (eds), The vanishing languages of the Pacific Rim, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007), pp. 301–336. .
3. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Ainu (Japan)". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. 
4. ↑ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh
5. ↑ Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2016. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
6. 1 2 3 Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim. Oxford, GB: OUP Oxford. 2007-01-01. pp. 377–382. ISBN 9780191532894. 
7. ↑ Hansen, A.S. (2014). "Re-vitalizing an indigenous language: Dictionaries of Ainu languages in Japan, 1625-2013". Lexicographica. 30 (1): 547-578. 
8. ↑ Bugaeva, Anna (2010). "Internet applications for endangered languages: A talking dictionary of Ainu". Waseda Institute for Advanced Study Research Bulletin 3: 73–81.
9. 1 2 "Ainu". Wals.info. Retrieved 2012-07-29. 
10. ↑ Frédéric, Louis (2005). "Ainu". Japan encyclopedia. Käthe Roth, translator (illustrated, reprint ed.). Harvard University Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-674-01753-6. 
11. ↑ Ivar Lissner (1957). The living past (4 ed.). Putnam's. p. 204. Retrieved 23 April 2012. In 1877 a young and industrious theologian went to visit the Ainu. His name was John Batchelor, and he was a scientist and missionary. He got to know the Ainu well, studied their language and customs, won their affection, and remained their staunch friend until the end of his days. It is to Batchelor that we owe our deepest insight into the [Original from the University of California Digitized Jan 27, 2009 Length 444 pages]
12. ↑ John Patric (1943). ...Why Japan was strong (4 ed.). Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. p. 72. Retrieved 23 April 2012. John Batchelor set about to learn the Ainu language, which the Japanese had not troubled ever to learn. He laboriously compiled an Ainu dictionary. He singlehandedly turned this hitherto but spoken tongue into a written language, and himself wrote books in it. [Original from the University of California Digitized Oct 16, 2007 Length 313 pages]
13. ↑ ethnologue.com
14. ↑ See this page at alanwood.net and this section of the Unicode specification.

References

• Bugaeva, Anna (2010). "Internet applications for endangered languages: A talking dictionary of Ainu". Waseda Institute for Advanced Study Research Bulletin. 3: 73–81. 
• Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, & Charles D. Fennig, eds. (2015). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (18th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Refsing, Kirsten (1986). The Ainu Language: The Morphology and Syntax of the Shizunai Dialect. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ISBN 87-7288-020-1. 
• Refsing, Kirsten (1996). Early European Writings on the Ainu Language. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-0400-0. 
• Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36918-5. 
• Tamura, Suzuko (2000). The Ainu Language. Tokyo: Sanseido. ISBN 4-385-35976-8. 

Further reading

• John Batchelor (1905). An Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary, including A Grammar of the Ainu Language (2, reprint ed.). Tokyo: Methodist Publishing House; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. p. 525. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Digitized by the University of Michigan December 8, 2006)
• Basil Hall Chamberlain; John Batchelor (1887). Ainu grammar. Tokyo: Imperial University. p. 174. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Digitized by Harvard University November 30, 2007)
• John Batchelor (1897). 聖書・新約: アイヌ. Yokohama Bunsha. p. 706. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Harvard University) (Digitized October 8, 2008)
• John Batchelor (1896). 聖書・新約: アイヌ. Yokohama Bunsha. p. 313. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Harvard University) (Digitized October 8, 2008 )
• British and Foreign Bible Society (1891). St Mark, St Luke and St John in Ainu. London: British and Foreign Bible Society. p. 348. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Harvard University) (Digitized June 9, 2008)
• Kyōsuke Kindaichi (1936). アイヌ語法概說. 岩波書店. p. 230. Retrieved March 1, 2012.  (Compiled by Mashiho Chiri) (University of Michigan) (Digitized August 15, 2006)

External links

Ainu language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Ainu phrasebook.

• Literature and materials for learning Ainu
• The Book of Common Prayer in Ainu, translated by John Batchelor, digitized by Richard Mammana and Charles Wohlers
• Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Ainu in Samani, Hokkaido
• A Grammar of the Ainu Language by John Batchelor
• An Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary, including A Grammar of the Ainu Language by John Batchelor
• "The 'Greater Austric' hypothesis" by John Bengtson (undated)
• Ainu for Beginners by Kane Kumagai, translated by Yongdeok Cho
• (Japanese) Radio lessons on Ainu language presented by Sapporo TV
• (Japanese) Ainu word list (Archived 2009-10-24)
• A talking dictionary of Ainu: a new version of Kanazawa's Ainu conversational dictionary, with recordings of Mrs. Setsu Kurokawa

Languages of Japan
National language	Japanese Variants
Indigenous languages	Ainu Hachijō Ryukyuan Amami Ōshima Kikai Kunigami Miyako Okinawan Okinoerabu Tokunoshima Yaeyama Yonaguni Yoron
Non-Indigenous languages	Brazilian Portuguese Chinese Cantonese Hokkien Hoochew Mandarin English Russian Turkish Vietnamese Zainichi Korean
Creole languages	Bonin English
Sign languages	Japanese Sign Language Amami Oshima Sign