The Ainu languages ( ), sometimes known as Ainuic, are a family of languages traditionally spoken by the Ainu people of northern Japan, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
The primary varieties of Ainu are alternately considered a group of closely related languages or divergent dialects of a single language isolate. Toponymic evidence suggests Ainu was once spoken in northern Honshu and that much of the historically attested extent of the family was due to a relatively recent expansion northward. No genealogical relationship between Ainu and any other language family has been demonstrated, despite numerous attempts.
Kuril Ainu was declared extinct in 1962 and Sakhalin Ainu in 1994. Hokkaidō Ainu was declared critically endangered in 2009.
Varieties
The three dialect groups are Hokkaidō Ainu, Kuril Ainu, and Sakhalin Ainu. Kuril Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu are both classified as extinct. Hokkaidō Ainu has been declared critically endangered by UNESCO and the current number of speakers is unknown.
Hokkaidō Ainu Hokkaidō Ainu is the group of dialects spoken by the Ainu people from modern-day Hokkaidō prefecture. It is subdivided into several smaller dialect groups with substantial differences between them: the 'neck' of the island (Oshima County, data from and ); the "classical" Ainu of central Hokkaidō around and the southern coast ( and counties, data from and ; historical records from Ishikari County and Sapporo show that these were similar); (on the southeastern cape in , but perhaps closest to the northeastern dialect); the northeast (data from and ); the north-central dialect (Kamikawa County, data from and ) and (on the northwestern cape), which was closest of all Hokkaidō varieties to Sakhalin Ainu.
Currently, Hokkaidō Ainu is the most commonly learned variety because it has the most materials like grammatical descriptions and records available to learn it. The Saru dialect is the most commonly learned by Ainu learners.
Kuril Ainu Kuril Ainu was spoken by the Ainu people from the Kuril Islands. The dialect group is divided into Northern and Southern Kuril Ainu.
There are not many published documents that record information about the Kuril Ainu dialects. Torii Ryūzō collected data about the Kuril dialect. Other Ainu language researchers have used Torii's work and data to create dictionaries and analyze the Ainu dialects. There is currently only one known document of Southern Kuril. Previously unpublished documents on Kuril Ainu have been found in Russia. Researchers assume that more unpublished documents exist since some works reference unknown documents and previously unknown documents have been found in archives.
Kuril Ainu is extinct. The records of it contain mostly data about vocabulary and do not provide much information on grammar. Currently, people seeking to learn Kuril Ainu have to learn dialects from other regions.
Sakhalin Ainu Sakhalin Ainu is the group of dialects spoken by the Ainu people from Sakhalin. The dialect group comprises several distinct dialects. The eastern coastal dialect of Taraika, near modern Gastello in Poronaysky District, was quite divergent from the other localities. The Raychishka dialect, on the western coast near modern Uglegorsk, is the best documented and has a dedicated grammatical description.
Tahkonanna, the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu, died in 1994. While Sakhalin Ainu is extinct, people are using records to learn it in revival efforts.
The Sakhalin Ainu dialects had long vowels and a final -h phoneme, which was pronounced .
Classification Alexander Vovin classifies the Ainu dialects as follows:
Proto-Ainu Proto-Hokkaido–Kuril Hokkaido dialects Kuril dialects Proto-Sakhalin Sakhalin dialects
Proto-language The proto-language was reconstructed twice by Alexander Vovin. +Consonants (Vovin 1989)LabialDental/AlveolarDorsalDorso-GlottalNasal*m*nStop*p*t*kContinuant*w*ð*ɣ*hSibilant*sRhotic*r +Consonants (Vovin 1993)BilabialDental/AlveolarDorsalGlottalNasal*m*nStopvoiceless*p*t*k(*q)voiced*d*gFricativevoiceless*s*hvoiced(*H)Sonorant*ɾ*j The second reconstruction shows the voiced stops except for [b] being distinct phonemes and uses for the glottal stop. He also tentatively proposes that there might have been a third fricative alongside *s and *h, which was voiced, its place of articulation unknown. He represents it with .
Reconstructed Proto-Ainu numerals (1–10) and its reflexes in selected descendants are as follows: +NumeralsProto-AinuHokkaido AinuSakhalin AinuKuril Ainu12345678910 Eight front and back vowels are reconstructed; three more central vowels are uncertain. +VowelsFrontCentralBackClose*i(*ü)(*ï)*uClose-Mid*e(*ë)*oOpen-Mid*E*OOpen*a*A
Orthography Ainu did not develop its own writing system. Ainu authors have used a modified katakana or Latin alphabet to write Ainu. An example of Ainu writing is the Ainu Times (アイヌタイムズ, Ainu Taimuzu), which is an Ainu-language newsletter written in both modified katakana and the Latin alphabet that is published four times a year by the Ainu Pen Club of Hokkaidō.
External relationships No genealogical relationship between Ainu and any other language family has been demonstrated, despite numerous attempts. Thus, it is a language isolate. Ainu is sometimes grouped with the Paleosiberian languages, but this is only a geographic blanket term for several unrelated language families that were present in easternmost Siberia before the advances of Turkic and Tungusic languages there.
A study by Lee and of Waseda University found evidence that the Ainu language and the early Ainu-speakers originated from the Northeast Asian/Okhotsk population, which established themselves in northern Hokkaido and expanded into large parts of Honshu and the Kurils.
The Ainu languages share a noteworthy amount of vocabulary (especially fish names) with several Northeast Asian languages, including Nivkh, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan. While linguistic evidence points to an origin of these words among the Ainu languages, its spread and how these words arrived into other languages will possibly remain a mystery.
The most frequent proposals for relatives of Ainu are given below:
Altaic John C. Street (1962) proposed linking Ainu, Korean, and Japanese in one family and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic in another, with the two families linked in a common "North Asiatic" family. Street's grouping was an extension of the Altaic hypothesis, which at the time linked Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, sometimes adding Korean; today Altaic sometimes includes Korean and rarely Japanese but not Ainu (Georg et al. 1999).
From a perspective more centered on Ainu, James Patrie (1982) adopted the same grouping, namely Ainu–Korean–Japanese and Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic, with these two families linked in a common family, as in Street's "North Asiatic".
Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) likewise classified Ainu with Korean and Japanese. He regarded "Korean–Japanese-Ainu" as forming a branch of his proposed Eurasiatic language family. Greenberg did not hold Korean–Japanese–Ainu to have an especially close relationship with Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic within this family.
The Altaic hypothesis is now rejected by the scholarly mainstream.
Austroasiatic Shafer (1965) presented evidence suggesting a distant connection with the Austroasiatic languages, which include many of the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. presented his reconstruction of Proto-Ainu with evidence, in the form of proposed sound changes and cognates, of a relationship with Austroasiatic. In 1993, Vovin still regarded this hypothesis as preliminary.
Language contact with the Nivkhs The Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with the Nivkhs during the course of their history. It is not known to what extent this has affected the language. Linguists believe the vocabulary shared between Ainu and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing.
Language contact with the Japanese The Ainu came into extensive contact with the Japanese in the 14th century. Analytic grammatical constructions acquired or transformed in Ainu were probably due to contact with the Japanese language. A large number of Japanese loanwords were borrowed into Ainu and to a smaller extent vice versa. There are also a great number of loanwords from the Japanese language in various stages of its development to Hokkaidō Ainu, and a smaller number of loanwords from Ainu into Japanese, particularly animal names such as (猟虎, 'sea otter'; Ainu ), (馴鹿, 'reindeer'; Ainu ), and (柳葉魚, a fish, Spirinchus lanceolatus; Ainu ). Due to the low status of Ainu in Japan, many ancient loanwords may be ignored or undetected, but there is evidence of an older substrate, where older Japanese words which have no clear etymology appear related to Ainu words which do. An example is modern Japanese or (鮭), meaning 'salmon', probably from the Ainu or for 'salmon', literally 'summer food'.
According to P. Elmer (2019), the Ainu languages are a contact language, i.e. have strong influences from various Japonic dialects/languages during different stages, suggesting early and intensive contact between them somewhere in the Tōhoku region, with Ainu borrowing a large amount of vocabulary and typological characteristics from early Japonic.
Other proposals A small number of linguists suggested a relation between Ainu and Indo-European languages, based on racial theories regarding the origin of the Ainu people. The theory of an Indo-European—Ainu relation was popular until 1960; later linguists dismissed it and concentrated on more local language families.
Tambovtsev (2008) proposes that Ainu is typologically most similar to Native American languages and suggests that further research is needed to establish a genetic relationship between these languages.
Geography Until the 20th century, Ainu languages were spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. Only the Hokkaido variant survives, with the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu having died in 1994.
Some linguists note that the Ainu language was an important lingua franca on Sakhalin. (2005) reported that the status of the Ainu language was rather high and was also used by early Russian and Japanese administrative officials to communicate with each other and with the indigenous people.
Ainu on mainland Japan
It is occasionally suggested that Ainu was the language of the indigenous people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. The main evidence for this is the presence of place names that appear to be of Ainu origin in both locations. For example, the common to many northern Japanese place names is known to derive from the Ainu word ("river") in Hokkaidō, and the same is suspected of similar names ending in in northern Honshū and , such as the and rivers in Toyama Prefecture.; ; Other place names in and , such as Mount Ashigara (), (modern Tokyo), Keta Shrine (), and the Noto Peninsula, have no explanation in Japanese, but do in Ainu. The traditional hunters of the mountain forests of retain Ainu words in their hunting vocabulary (see Matagi dialect). However, Elmer (2019) has also suggested Japonic etymologies, which supposedly got borrowed into early Ainu and lost in contemporary Japonic dialects.