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Ainu language
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Hokkaido Ainu (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese: ainu-go; Cyrillic alphabet: ???? ????) is an Ainu language spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Until the twentieth 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. All but the Hokkaido language are extinct, and Hokkaido is moribund, though there are ongoing attempts to revive it.
Ainu has no generally accepted genealogical relationship to any other language family.

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Encyclopedia
Hokkaido Ainu (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese: ainu-go; Cyrillic alphabet: ???? ????) is an Ainu language spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Until the twentieth 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. All but the Hokkaido language are extinct, and Hokkaido is moribund, though there are ongoing attempts to revive it.
Ainu has no generally accepted genealogical relationship to any other language family. For the most frequent proposals, see Ainu languages.
Speakers
Ainu is a moribund language, and has been endangered for at least the past few decades. Most of the 150,000 ethnic Ainu in Japan speak only Japanese. In the town of Nibutani (part of Biratori, Hokkaido) where many of the remaining native speakers live, there are 100 speakers, out of which only 15 used the language every day in the late 1980s. The number of speakers today (by whatever definition one may use) is not known with any certainty. In all of Hokkaido, it is estimated that there are perhaps 1,000 native speakers, almost all older than 30. Among Ainu speakers (broadly defined), second-language learners presently outnumber native ones.
However, use of the language is on the rise. There is currently an active movement to revitalize the language — mainly in Hokkaido but also elsewhere — to reverse the centuries-long decline in the number of speakers. This has led to 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.
Phonology
Ainu syllables are CV(C) (that is, they have an obligatory syllable onset and an optional syllable coda) and there are few consonant clusters.
There are five vowels:
Consonants:
The glottal stop only occurs at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel. The sequence is realized as and becomes before and at the end of syllables. The affricate has voiced and post-alveolar variants. There is some variation among dialects; in the Sakhalin dialect, syllable-final , , , lenited and merged into . After an , this is pronounced as .
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
Ainu is SOV, with postpositions. Subject and object are usually marked with postpositions. 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.
Typologically, Ainu is similar in word order (and some aspects of phonology) to Japanese and Korean, while its high degree of synthesis is more reminiscent of languages to its north and east.
Ainu traditionally featured incorporation of nouns and adverbs; this is rare 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
Officially, 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, is spelt c and as y; , 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 (e.g. á). This is usually not denoted in katakana.
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., 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 are either smaller in size, or feature a dakuten or handakuten. As few fonts yet support these extensions, workarounds exist for many of the characters, such as the small katakana ku used as in ? (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 been removed from future Unicode implementations as they can be easily displayed as a combination of two existing characters.
| Character | Unicode | Appearance | Name | Ainu usage |
|---|
| ? | 31F0 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ku | Final k | | ? | 31F1 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Si | s | | ? | 31F2 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Su | s, used to emphasize it's pronounced rather than normal . and are allophones in Ainu. | | ? | 31F3 | ? | Katakana Letter Small To | Final t | | ? | 31F4 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Nu | Final n | | ? | 31F5 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ha | h , succeeding the vowel a. (e.g. ?? ah) Sakhalin dialect only. | | ? | 31F6 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Hi | h , succeeding the vowel i. (e.g. ?? ih) Sakhalin dialect only. | | ? | 31F7 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Hu | h , succeeding the vowel u. (e.g. ?? uh) Sakhalin dialect only. | | ? | 31F8 | ? | Katakana Letter Small He | h , succeeding the vowel e. (e.g. ?? eh) Sakhalin dialect only. | | ? | 31F9 | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ho | h , succeeding the vowel o. (e.g. ?? oh) Sakhalin dialect only. | | ? | 31FA | ? | Katakana Letter Small Mu | Final m | | ? | 31FB | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ra | r , succeeding the vowel a. (e.g. ?? ar) | | ? | 31FC | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ri | r , succeeding the vowel i. (e.g. ?? ir) | | ? | 31FD | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ru | r , succeeding the vowel u. (e.g. ?? ur) | | ? | 31FE | ? | Katakana Letter Small Re | r , succeeding the vowel e. (e.g. ?? er) | | ? | 31FF | ? | Katakana Letter Small Ro | r , succeeding the vowel o. (e.g. ?? or) | | Rejected characters (Unicode represents them using combining characters) |
|---|
| | 31F7 + 309A | ? | Katakana Letter Small Pu | Final p | | | 30BB + 309A | ?? | Katakana Letter Se With Semi-Voiced Sound Mark | ce | | | 30C4 + 309A | ?? | Katakana Letter Tu With Semi-Voiced Sound Mark | tu. ?? and ?? are interchangeable. | | | 30C8 + 309A | ?? | Katakana Letter To With Semi-Voiced Sound Mark | tu. ?? and ?? are interchangeable. | |
Basic syllables
| | a [a] | i [i] | u [u] | e [e] | o [o] |
|---|
| | a ? [a] | i ? [i] | u ? [u] | e ? [e] | o ? [o] | k [k] 1 | ka ? [ka] | ki ? [ki] | ku ? [ku] | ke ? [ke] | ko ? [ko] | -k ? [-k] | s [s] ~ [] | sa ??/? 2 [sa] ~ [a] | si ? [i] | su ??/? 2 [su] ~ [u] | se ??/? 2 [se] ~ [e] | so ??/? 2 [so] ~ [o] | -s ?/? 2 [-] | t [t] 1 | ta ? [ta] | ci ? [ti] | tu ??/?? 2 [tu] | te ? [te] | to ? [to] | -t ?/? 3 [-t] | c [ts] ~ [t] 1 | ca ?? [tsa] ~ [ta] | ci ? [ti] | cu ?? [tsu] ~ [tu] | ce ?? [tse] ~ [te] | co ?? [tso] ~ [to] | n [n] | na ? [na] | ni ? [ni] | nu ? [nu] | ne ? [ne] | no ? [no] | -n ?/? 4 [-n/-m-/-?-] 5 | h 6 [h] | ha ? [ha] | hi ? [çi] | hu ? [u] | he ? [he] | ho ? [ho] | -h 6 [-x] | -ah ? [-ax] | -ih ? [-iç] | -uh ? [-ux] | -eh ? [-ex] | -oh ? [-ox] | p [p] 1 | pa ? [pa] | pi ? [pi] | pu ? [pu] | pe ? [pe] | po ? [po] | -p ? [-p] | m [m] | ma ? [ma] | mi ? [mi] | mu ? [mu] | me ? [me] | mo ? [mo] | -m ? [-m] | y [j] | ya ? [ja] | | yu ? [ju?] | ye ?? [je] | yo ? [jo] | r [] | ra ? [a] | ri ? [i] | ru ? [u] | re ? [e] | ro ? [o] | -ar ?2 [-a] | -ir ?2 [-i] | -ur ?2 [-u] | -er ?2 [-e] | -or ?2 [-o] | -r ?2 [-] | w [w] | wa ? [wa] | wi ??/? 2 [wi] | | we ??/? 2 [we] | wo ??/? 2 [wo] | |
- 1: k, t, c, p are sometimes voiced as [g], [d], [dz] ~ [d], [b], respectively. It doesn't change the meaning of a word, but it sounds more rough/masculine. When they are voiced, they may be written as g, d, j, dz, b, ?, ?, ??, ??, ?, etc.
- 2: Both used according to actual pronunciations, or to writer's preferred styles.
- 3: ? is final t at the end of a word. (e.g. pet = ?? = ??) In the middle of a polysyllabic word, it's a final consonant preceding the initial with a same value. (e.g. orta /otta/ = ???. ??? is not preferred.)
- 4: At the end of a word, n can be written either ? or ?. In the middle of a polysyllabic word, it's ?. (e.g. tan-mosir = ????? = ??+???, but not ?????.)
- 5: [m] before [p], [?] before [k], [n] elsewhere. Unlike Japanese, it does not become other sounds such as nasal vowels.
- 6: Initial h [h] and final h [x] are different phenomes. Final h exists in Sakhalin dialect only.
Diphthongs Final is spelt y in Latin, small ? in katakana. Final is spelt w in Latin, small ? in katakana. is spelt ae, ??, or ??.
Example with initial k:
| | | | | | | |
|---|
| kay | kuy | koy | kaw | kiw | kew | | key | | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | |
Since the above rule is used systematically, some katakana combinations have different sounds from conventional Japanese.
| | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? |
|---|
| Ainu | | | | | | | | Japanese | | | | | | | |
Long vowels There are long vowels in Sakhalin dialect. Either circumflex or macron is used in Latin, long vowel sign is used in katakana.
Example with initial k:
| [ka?] | [ki?] | [ku?] | [ke?] | [ko?] |
|---|
| kâ | kî | kû | kê | kô | | ka | ki | ku | ke | ko | | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | |
Oral literature
The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of hero-sagas called Yukar, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms.
See also
External links
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- in Samani, Hokkaido
- by John Batchelor
- by John Batchelor
- by John Bengtson (undated)
- by Kane Kumagai, translated by Yongdeok Cho
Japanese
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