About the Ainu language

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The Ainu language is the language of Ainu people—the indigenous people that lived in the island of Hokkaido, northern Honshu (the main island of Japan), southern half of Sakhalin, the Kuril islands, and maybe at the tip of the Kamchatka peninsula. Now Ainu live mostly in Hokkaido but there are large Ainu communities in the greater Tokyo area and Kanto area, and smaller communities in other places in Japan and other countries, too.

Ainu is an endangered language, which means that the chain of parents teaching the language to their children has been broken (this is called language shift) and the number of the language speakers is diminishing. And not only that, Ainu is a critically endangered language, which means that there are barely any speakers left and the language is about to disappear. Well, it is not that simple. There are Ainu and other people, who are learning the language from the scratch and try to revitalized it. You can join the forces, too, by starting to learn Ainu on this site!

Why did Ainu become an endangered language?

Ainu have always been in contact with their neighboring people and the relationship became complicated especially with their southern neighbors, sisam or as the sisam themselves would say it wajin. Sisam/wajin means ethnically Japanese people from the point of view of Ainu. The sisam started to creep into the Ainu lands and finally in 1868 annexed Hokkaido, the island with the largest Ainu population as part of Japan. Ainu were not asked if they want to join or not. In addition to that, the Japanese government announced the Ainu lands as the state's property and started to treat Ainu as strangers in their own land. The traditional Ainu livelihoods, fishing salmon and hunting deer, were prohibited, and so were many Ainu cultural practices, like men's earrings, women's mouth and hand tattoos, and burning down the house when the lady of the house died. Ainu were made Japanese citizens against their will and there was a strong pressure for assimilate to the Japanese culture and society.

The laws also stated that Ainu children must start to go to school, not the same schools as sisam children but special schools aimed for the Ainu children or  'former aborgines  as sisam called Ainu. In the Ainu schools, majority of the teaching was Japanese nationalistic propaganda and the teachers spoke Japanese only. That was also expected from the Ainu children. The children were teased, ridiculed and punished if they spoke Ainu, so many stopped speaking Ainu totally. Also the adults were discriminated against, so many tried to hide their Ainu origins and to pass as Japanese.

The last generation of Ainu native speakers was born between 1900-1910. Their children did not learn Ainu as the first language but Japanese. There was one more generation that was raised as Ainu speakers around 1950s. These children were the grandchildren of the last native speaker generation and because their parents were working longer periods of time outside their living areas, these children were raised in Ainu by their grandparents. However, when these children entered school, many of the stopped speaking Ainu and they started to forget the language. Some of these 1950s kids are now trying to remember their earlier language skills and contribute to the Ainu revitalization movement.

The Ainu varieties

Ainu has several varieties. The main three varieties are Hokkaido Ainu, Sakhalin Ainu, and Kuril Ainu. If a speaker of Hokkaido and Sakhalin Ainu met, they had some difficulties to understand each other because their varieties were so different. Hokkaido Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu can be divided to even smaller variety areas. Recent years, it is suggested that Hokkaido Ainu should be divided in two areas: southwestern and northeastern. But that is not all. Every kotan (Ainu village) or village cluster at a certain riverside has their own way of speaking, slightly different from the others. These village or more like river-based varieties are usually called dialects and there are several of them. On this site, I use the Saru dialect, which part of southwestern Hokkaido Ainu variant.

What kind of language Ainu is?

Language typologywise, Ainu is an agglutinative, polysynthetic, head-marking, and incorporating language. If you are not a linguist like me, these words probably don't mean anything to you. So, let me explain.

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Pros and cons of different Ainu orthographies (writing systems)

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Created on 2023/2/10, Latest update on 2023/2/19