Ainu language

Ainu, or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is the native language of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate with no academic consensus regarding its origin. Until the 20th century, the Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu, Kuril Ainu, and Sakhalin Ainu – were spoken throughout Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small communities in the Kuril Islands, up to the southern tip of Kamchatka.
Following the colonization of Hokkaido, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers declined steadily throughout the 20th century. By 2008, Hokkaido Ainu was critically endangered, with only two elderly people reported to speak it as their first language. According to the linguist Hiroshi Nakagawa, by 2021 no one in Japan had Ainu as their first language.

Speakers

The term "Ainu" comes from the endonym of the Ainu people, aynu, meaning "person" or "human".
According to UNESCO, Ainu is an endangered language with few native speakers. Although there are estimated to be at least 30,000 Ainu people in Japan, there is a low rate of self-identification as Ainu among people with Ainu ethnic roots. Knowledge of the language was already endangered by the 1960s and has continued to decline since., just 304 people within Japan were reported to understand the Ainu language to some extent., Ethnologue listed Ainu as "nearly extinct".
In 2017, 671 people aged 15 or above from 291 randomly selected households participated in a Hokkaido government survey on the lives of Ainu people. Participants were believed to be descendants of Ainu people or those who joined Ainu families by marriage or adoption. In response to survey questions about fluency in the Ainu language, 0.7% of participants answered that they "would be able to have a conversation" in Ainu, 3.4% answered that they "would be able to converse a little", 44.6% answered they "couldn't speak but had some knowledge about Ainu language", and 48.1% answered that they "couldn't speak at all".
In a subsequent survey of 472 respondents in 2023, 0.8% of respondents answered that they "would be able to have a conversation" in Ainu, 8.9% answered they "would be able to converse a little", 19.3% answered they "could barely converse at all", and 69.3% answered they "would not be able to converse at all".

Ainu language level	1993	1999	2006	2013	2017	2023
Can hold a conversation	0.8	0.8	0.7	0.9	0.7	0.8
Can speak a little	5.4	4.5	3.9	6.3	3.4	8.9
Cannot speak but have some knowledge	37.1	38.3	32.4	44.2	44.6
Neither speak nor understand	54.8	51.6	61.2	46.2	48.1
Unknown	1.9	4.8	1.7	2.4	3.1	1.7
Sample size	642	715	712	586	671	472

Official recognition

The Japanese government made a decision to recognize Ainu as an indigenous language in June 2008. The Japanese government approved and passed a bill officially recognising the indigeneity of the Ainu people in 2019.
On 12 July 2020, the Japanese government opened the National Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokkaido. It forms one of three institutions named Upopoy alongside the National Ainu Park and a memorial site on high ground on the east side of Lake Poroto where Ainu services are held. Its director, Masahiro Nomoto, says that "One of our main objectives is to preserve and revive the language, as this is one of the most threatened elements of Ainu culture".
Announcements on some bus routes in Hokkaido can since be heard in Ainu, efforts are being undertaken to archive Ainu speech recordings by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and there is a popular educational YouTube channel which teaches conversational Ainu.
While these measures have been praised for taking steps to protect the Ainu language and culture, the museum and related government efforts have been criticised for failing to acknowledge the history of Japanese discrimination against the Ainu people, and for the government's refusal to apologise for past misdeeds against the Ainu.

Phonology

Ainu syllables are V; they have an obligatory vowel, and an optional syllable onset and coda consisting of one consonant. There are few consonant clusters.

Vowels

There are five vowels in Ainu:

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Consonants

s may be voiced between vowels and after nasals. can be heard as in free variation among speakers. Both and are realized as, and becomes before and at the end of syllables. is heard as when occurring before. is heard as when before, as well as in final position. A glottal stop is often inserted at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel, but is non-phonemic.
The Ainu language also has a pitch accent system. Generally, words containing affixes have a high pitch on a syllable in the stem. This will typically fall on the first syllable if that is long, and will otherwise fall on the second syllable, though there are exceptions to this generalization.

Typology and grammar

, Ainu is similar in word order to Japanese.
Ainu has a canonical word order of subject, object, verb, and 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.
Classical Ainu, the language of the, 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 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.
Ainu has a system of verbal affixes which mark agreement for person and case. The specific cases that are marked differ by person, with nominative–accusative marking for the first person singular, tripartite marking for the first person plural and indefinite person, and direct or 'neutral' marking for the second singular and plural, and third persons.

Sentence types

Intransitive sentences

Transitive and ditransitive sentences

Writing

The Ainu language is written in a modified version of the Japanese katakana syllabary, although it is possible for Japanese loan words and names to be written in kanji. There is also a Latin-based alphabet in use. The Ainu Times publishes in both. In the Latin orthography, is spelled c and is spelled y; the glottal stop,, 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. This is usually not denoted in katakana.
The Rev. John Batchelor was an English missionary who lived among the Ainu, studied them and published many works on the Ainu language. 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. Batchelor's translations of various books of the Bible were published from 1887, and his New Testament translation 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.

Special katakana for the Ainu language

A Unicode standard exists for a set of extended katakana for transliterating the Ainu language and other languages written with katakana. 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 to produce ク to represent the separate small katakana glyph ㇰ used as in アイヌイタㇰ.
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

is spelled y in Latin, small ィ in katakana. Final is spelled w in Latin, small ゥ in katakana. Large イ and ウ are used if there is a morpheme boundary with イ and ウ at the morpheme head. is spelled ae, アエ or アェ.


kay	kuy	key	koy	kaw	kiw	kew	kow
カィ	クィ	ケィ	コィ	カゥ	キゥ	ケゥ	コゥ

ka	ku	ke	ko	ka	ki	ke	ko
カイ	クイ	ケイ	コイ	カウ	キウ	ケウ	コウ

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

	ウィ	クィ	コウ	スィ	ティ	トゥ	フィ
Ainu
Japanese