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Ainu language

 

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Ainu language



 
 
Hokkaido Ainu (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
: ainu-go; Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
: ???? ????) is an Ainu language
Ainu languages

The Ainu languages were a small language family spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, an island chain that stretches from Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula....
 spoken by members of the Ainu
Ainu people

are an ethnic group indigenous peoples to Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin. There are most likely over 150,000 Ainu today; however the exact figure is not known as many Ainu hide their origin due to Ethnic issues in Japan....
 ethnic group
Ethnic group

An ethnic group is a group of humans whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or presumed.Ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness and the recognition of common culture, linguistic, religion, human behaviour or Race traits, real or presumed, as indic...
 on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido
Hokkaido

, formerly known as Ezo, Yezo, Yeso, or Yesso, is Japan's second largest island and the largest, northernmost of its 47 prefectures of Japan....
.

Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin
Sakhalin

Sakhalin , also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45?50' and 54?24' N. It is part of Russia and is its largest island, administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast....
 and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands
Kuril Islands

The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands in Russia's Sakhalin Oblast region, is a volcanic archipelago that stretches approximately 1,300 km northeast from Hokkaido, Japan, to Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean....
. 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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Hokkaido Ainu (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
: ainu-go; Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
: ???? ????) is an Ainu language
Ainu languages

The Ainu languages were a small language family spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, an island chain that stretches from Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula....
 spoken by members of the Ainu
Ainu people

are an ethnic group indigenous peoples to Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin. There are most likely over 150,000 Ainu today; however the exact figure is not known as many Ainu hide their origin due to Ethnic issues in Japan....
 ethnic group
Ethnic group

An ethnic group is a group of humans whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or presumed.Ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness and the recognition of common culture, linguistic, religion, human behaviour or Race traits, real or presumed, as indic...
 on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido
Hokkaido

, formerly known as Ezo, Yezo, Yeso, or Yesso, is Japan's second largest island and the largest, northernmost of its 47 prefectures of Japan....
.

Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin
Sakhalin

Sakhalin , also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45?50' and 54?24' N. It is part of Russia and is its largest island, administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast....
 and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands
Kuril Islands

The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands in Russia's Sakhalin Oblast region, is a volcanic archipelago that stretches approximately 1,300 km northeast from Hokkaido, Japan, to Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean....
. 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
Ainu languages

The Ainu languages were a small language family spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, an island chain that stretches from Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula....
.

Speakers


Ainu is a moribund language
Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language....
, and has been endangered for at least the past few decades. Most of the 150,000 ethnic Ainu
Ainu people

are an ethnic group indigenous peoples to Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin. There are most likely over 150,000 Ainu today; however the exact figure is not known as many Ainu hide their origin due to Ethnic issues in Japan....
 in Japan speak only Japanese. In the town of Nibutani
Nibutani

The Nibutani , Niputay in Ainu language, district is part of the town of Biratori, Hokkaido in Hokkaido, Japan, a particularly large proportion of the population of which is of the indigenous Ainu people ethnicity....
 (part of Biratori, Hokkaido
Biratori, Hokkaido

is a town located in Saru District, Hokkaido, Hidaka Subprefecture, Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan.As of 2008, the town has an estimated population of 5,909 and a population density of 7.95 persons per km?....
) 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 speaker
Native Speaker

Native Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee?s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a ?native speaker.?...
s, 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
Shigeru Kayano

was one of the last native speakers of Ainu language and a leading figure in the Ainu people ethnic movement in Japan....
, himself a native speaker.

Phonology

Ainu syllable
Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
s are CV(C) (that is, they have an obligatory syllable onset
Syllable onset

In phonetics and phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a syllable that precedes the syllable nucleus....
 and an optional syllable coda
Syllable coda

In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the syllable nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a syllable rime....
) and there are few consonant cluster
Consonant cluster

In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
s.

There are five vowel
Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
s:
The vowels of Ainu
  Front
Front vowel

A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....
 
Central
Central vowel

A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel....
 
Back
Back vowel

A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....
Close
Close vowel

A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....
i u
Mid
Mid vowel

A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel....
e o
Open
Open vowel

An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth....
a  


Consonant
Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx....
s:
The consonants of Ainu
 Bilabial
Bilabial consonant

In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
Labio-
Labiovelar consonant

The term labiovelar is ambiguous. It may mean Labial-velar consonant , or it may mean labialization velar consonant .When the manner of articulation is a stop consonant, nasal consonant, or fricative consonant, these are quite different....

velar
Labiovelar consonant

The term labiovelar is ambiguous. It may mean Labial-velar consonant , or it may mean labialization velar consonant .When the manner of articulation is a stop consonant, nasal consonant, or fricative consonant, these are quite different....
Alveolar
Alveolar consonant

Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the Dental alveolus of the superior teeth....
Palatal
Palatal consonant

Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex consonant....
Velar
Velar consonant

Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the Soft palate)....
Glottal
Glottal consonant

Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all....
Stop
Stop consonant

A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms....
   
Affricate
Affricate consonant

Affricate consonants begin as stop consonants but release as a fricative consonant rather than directly into the following vowel....
         
Nasal
Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
       
Fricative
Fricative consonant

Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German language , the final consonant of Bach; or the side of the tongue ag...
       
Approximant
Approximant consonant

Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and "typical" consonants. In the articulation of approximants, articulatory organs produce a narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough space for air to flow without much audible turbulence....
       
Tap/flap
Flap consonant

In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another....
         


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
Sakhalin

Sakhalin , also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45?50' and 54?24' N. It is part of Russia and is its largest island, administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast....
 dialect, syllable-final , , , lenited
Lenition

Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. Along with assimilation , it is one of the primary sources of historical linguistics of languages....
 and merged into . After an , this is pronounced as .

There is a pitch accent
Pitch accent

Pitch accent is a linguistics term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in Pitch to give prominence to a syllable or Mora_ within a word....
 system. The accentuation of specific words varies somewhat from dialect to dialect. Generally, words including affix
Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivation , like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed....
es 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
Subject Object Verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb is the type of languages in which the subject , object , and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order....
, 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
Derivation (linguistics)

In linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine....
.

Typologically
Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages....
, Ainu is similar in word order (and some aspects of phonology) to Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
 and Korean
Korean language

Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
, while its high degree of synthesis
Synthetic language

A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties....
 is more reminiscent of languages to its north and east.

Ainu traditionally featured incorporation
Incorporation (linguistics)

Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntax function....
 of nouns and adverbs; this is rare in the modern colloquial language.

Applicatives
Applicative voice

The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique case argument of a verb to the Patient argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb....
 may be used in Ainu to place nouns in the dative
Dative case

The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. For example, in "John gave a book to Mary"....
, instrumental
Instrumental case

The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action....
, comitative
Comitative case

The comitative case, also known as the associative case, is a grammatical case that denotes companionship, and is used where English would use "in company with" or "together with"....
, locative
Locative case

Locative is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases together with the lative case and separative case case....
, allative
Allative case

Allative case is a type of the Locative case used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions....
, or ablative
Ablative case

In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to grammatical case in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ....
 roles. Besides freestanding nouns, these roles may be assigned to incorporated nouns, and such use of applicatives is in fact mandatory for incorporating oblique
Oblique case

An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a sentence or a preposition....
 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
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
 katakana
Katakana

is a Japanese language syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji....
 syllabary. There is also a Latin
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
-based alphabet in use. The Ainu Times
Ainu Times

The Ainu Times is the only newspaper published in the Ainu language. It uses both special katakana and romanizations in its articles. Its current editor is Takashi Hamada....
 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
Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
 boundaries, such as after a prefix. Its pitch accent is denoted by acute accent
Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Greek alphabet writing systems....
 in Latin (e.g. á). This is usually not denoted in katakana.

Special katakana for the Ainu language
A Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 standard exists for a set of extended katakana
Katakana

is a Japanese language syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji....
 (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
Dakuten

, colloquially ten-ten , is a diacritic sign most often used in the Japanese language kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced consonant....
 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
Syllable coda

In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the syllable nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a syllable rime....
 k
? 31F1 ? Katakana Letter Small Sis
? 31F2 ? Katakana Letter Small Sus, used to emphasize it's pronounced rather than normal . and are allophone
Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
s in Ainu.
? 31F3 ? Katakana Letter Small To Final t
? 31F4 ? Katakana Letter Small Nu Final n
? 31F5 ? Katakana Letter Small Hah , succeeding the vowel a. (e.g. ?? ah) Sakhalin dialect only.
? 31F6 ? Katakana Letter Small Hih , succeeding the vowel i. (e.g. ?? ih) Sakhalin dialect only.
? 31F7 ? Katakana Letter Small Huh , succeeding the vowel u. (e.g. ?? uh) Sakhalin dialect only.
? 31F8 ? Katakana Letter Small Heh , succeeding the vowel e. (e.g. ?? eh) Sakhalin dialect only.
? 31F9 ? Katakana Letter Small Hoh , succeeding the vowel o. (e.g. ?? oh) Sakhalin dialect only.
? 31FA ? Katakana Letter Small Mu Final m
? 31FB ? Katakana Letter Small Rar , succeeding the vowel a. (e.g. ?? ar)
? 31FC ? Katakana Letter Small Rir , succeeding the vowel i. (e.g. ?? ir)
? 31FD ? Katakana Letter Small Rur , succeeding the vowel u. (e.g. ?? ur)
? 31FE ? Katakana Letter Small Rer , succeeding the vowel e. (e.g. ?? er)
? 31FF ? Katakana Letter Small Ror , succeeding the vowel o. (e.g. ?? or)
Rejected characters (Unicode represents them using combining character
Combining character

In digital typography, combining characters are Character that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks ....
s)
  31F7 + 309A ? Katakana Letter Small Pu Final p
  30BB + 309A ?? Katakana Letter Se With Semi-Voiced Sound Markce
  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 vowel
Nasal vowel

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the Soft palate so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation....
s.
6: Initial h [h] and final h [x] are different phenomes. Final h exists in Sakhalin dialect only.


Diphthongs


Final
Syllable coda

In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the syllable nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a syllable rime....
  is spelt y in Latin, small ? in katakana. Final is spelt w in Latin, small ? in katakana. is spelt ae, ??, or ??.

Example with initial
Syllable onset

In phonetics and phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a syllable that precedes the syllable nucleus....
 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
Circumflex

The circumflex is a diacritic mark used in written Serbian language, Croatian language, Esperanto, French language, West Frisian language, Norwegian language, Romanian language, Slovak language, Vietnamese language, Romaji, Romanization of Persian, Welsh language, Portuguese language, Italian language, Afrikaans language, Turkish language...
 or macron
Macron

A macron, from Greek language meaning "long", is a diacritic ? placed over or under a vowel which was originally used to mark a Long syllable#Syllable weight in classical poetry in Meter #Greek and Latin, but has now been taken also to indicate that the vowel is long vowel....
 is used in Latin, long vowel sign
Choon

The , also known as ', ', or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese typographic symbols which indicates a choon, or a long vowel of two mora e in length....
is used in katakana.

Example with initial k:
[ka?] [ki?] [ku?] [ke?] [ko?]
ka ki ku ke ko
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Oral literature

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition
Oral literature

Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the writing word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do....
 of hero-sagas called Yukar
Yukar

are Ainu people sagas that form a long rich tradition of oral literature. In older periods the epics were performed by both men and women; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Ainu culture was in decline, women were generally the most skilful performers....
, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms.

See also

  • List of Ainu terms
    List of Ainu terms

    The Ainu language of the Ainu people is distinct from those of the people around them.The list is ordered alphabetically by romanization....
  • Ainu music
    Ainu music

    Ainu music refers to the musical traditions of the Ainu people of northern Japan.Genres include the oldest, yukar , which is a form of epic poetry, and upopo, in which "the second contrapuntal voice had to imitate the musical formula in the first contrapuntal voice , at an interval much shorter than that in our western canon , since the s...
  • Kannari Matsu
  • Chiri Mashiho
  • Chiri Takao
  • Kyosuke Kindaichi
    Kyosuke Kindaichi

    was an eminent Japanese Linguistics from Morioka, Iwate, Iwate Prefecture. He is chiefly known for his dictations of yukar, or sagas of the Ainu people....
  • Bronislaw Pilsudski
    Bronislaw Pilsudski

    Bronislaw Piotr Pilsudski , brother of J?zef Pilsudski, was a Poland cultural anthropology who conducted outstanding research on the Ainu people ethnic group, which at the time inhabited Sakhalin Island, but now live mostly on the Japanese island of Hokkaido with only a small minority left on Sakhalin....
  • Shigeru Kayano
    Shigeru Kayano

    was one of the last native speakers of Ainu language and a leading figure in the Ainu people ethnic movement in Japan....


External links


  • in Samani, Hokkaido
    Samani, Hokkaido

    , is a town located in Samani District, Hokkaido, Hidaka Subprefecture, Hokkaido, Japan.As of 2008, the town has an estimated population of 5,466 and a population density of 15.84 persons per km2....
  • by John Batchelor
  • by John Batchelor
  • by John Bengtson (undated)
  • by Kane Kumagai, translated by Yongdeok Cho


Japanese