Ainu language

For the language spoken in Central Asia, see Aini language.

The Ainu language (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese: ainu-go) is spoken by the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It was once spoken in the Kurile Islands, the northern part of Honshu, and the southern half of Sakhalin.

Relation to other languages

Ainu is generally thought to be a language isolate with no known relation to other languages. It is sometimes grouped with the Paleosiberian languages, but this is merely a cover term for several isolates and small language families believed to have been present in Siberia prior to the arrival of Turkic and Tungusic speakers; it is not a proper language family. Most linguists believe the shared vocabulary between Ainu and Nivkh (spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing; there are also loanwords both from Ainu to Japanese and Japanese to Ainu. In recent years, the Japanese linguist Shichiro Murayama and others have tried to link it by both vocabulary and cultural comparisons to the Austronesian languages. Alexander Vovin (1993) presented evidence suggesting a distant connection with Austroasiatic; he regards this hypothesis as preliminary. More recently, Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) has argued that Ainu belongs to the “Eurasiatic languages”; this hypothesis remains highly controversial.

Speakers

Ainu is a moribund language, and has been endangered for at least the past few decades. Most of the 150,000 self-proclaimed ethnic Ainu in Japan (many additional Ainu are not aware of their origins or are secretive for fear of discrimination) 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 revitalization movement — 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:

The vowels of Ainu
	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Consonants:

The consonants of Ainu
	Bilabial	Labio- velar	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stop
Affricate
Nasal
Fricative
Approximant
Trill

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 .

There is a pitch accent system; words including affixes have a high pitch on the stem, or on the first syllable if it is closed or has a diphthong. Other words have the high pitch on the second syllable.

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.

Writing

Officially, the Ainu language is written in a modified version of the Japanese syllabary katakana. 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; is written either as an equals sign (=) for glottal stops between vowels (such as in a=sapte), or as a t before or a doubling of the following consonant (such as in cotca or hoyuppa. While this is similar to romanized Japanese, what the doubled consonant represents is very different in the two languages). Other phonemes use the same character as the IPA transcription given above.

The Unicode character range Katakana Phonetic Extensions (31F0–31FF) , includes katakana characters mainly for the Ainu language. Katakana for final consonants, which do not appear in Japanese, are used often in Ainu. As few fonts yet support these extensions, one workaround is to use the corresponding regular kana symbol reduced in size, such as katakana ku used for Aynu itak.

Oral literature

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of hero-sagas called Yukar, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms.

Notes

References

External links

Ainu sentences (English)
Radio lessons on Ainu language - Presented by Sapporo TV (Japanese)
Ainu word list (Japanese)
Ethnologue entry for Ainu
Information at the RosettaProject

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Ainu language