Ainu languages

Ainu
Geographic distribution:	Hokkaidō; formerly southern and central Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and perhaps the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Tōhoku Region of Honshū
Genetic classification:	A primary language family
Subdivisions:	Hokkaidō Ainu Sakhalin Ainu Kuril Ainu
Map of the Ainu region

The Ainu languages were a small language family spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, an island chain that stretches from Hokkaidō to the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. They are alternately considered a group of closely related languages, or as divergent dialects of a single language isolate. The only surviving member is the endangered Hokkaidō Ainu.

Varieties

Shibatani (1990:9) and Piłsudski (1998:2) speak of "Ainu languages" when comparing the varieties of Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. However, Vovin (1993) speaks only of "dialects". Hattori (1955) considered Ainu data from 19 regions of Hokkaido and Sakhalin. The primary division was between the two islands.

• Data on Kuril Ainu is scarce, but it is thought to have been as divergent as Sakhalin and Hokkaidō.
• In Sakhalin Ainu, an eastern coastal dialect of Taraika [near modern Gastello (Poronaysk)] was quite divergent from the other localities, all to the south. The Raychishka dialect, on the western coast near modern Uglegorsk, is the best documented, and has a dedicated grammatical description. The last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu died in 1994.
• Hokkaidō Ainu clustered into several dialects with substantial differences between them: the 'neck' of the island (Oshima County, data from Oshamambe and Yakumo); the "Classical" Ainu of central Hokkaidō around Sapporo and the southern coast (Iburi and Hidaka counties, data from Horobetsu, Biratori, Nukkibetsu, and Niikappu; historical records from Ishikari County and Sapporo show that these were similar); Samani (on the southeastern cape in Hidaka, but perhaps closest to the northeastern dialect); the northeast (data from Obihiro, Kushiro, and Bihoro); the north-central dialect (Kamikawa County, data from Asahikawa and Nayoro); and Sōya (on the northwestern cape), which was closest of all Hokkaidō varieties to Sakhalin Ainu. Most texts and grammatical descriptions we have of Ainu cover the Central Hokkaidō dialect.

Scanty data from Western voyages at the turn of the 19th–20th century (Tamura 2000) suggest there was also great diversity in northern Sakhalin, which was not sampled by Hattori.

It is often reported that Ainu was the language of the indigenous Emishi people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu, and that it was also spoken on the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The main evidence for this is the presence of placenames that appear to be of Ainu origin in both locations. For example, the -betsu common to many northern Japanese place names is known to derive from the Ainu word pet "river" in Hokkaidō, and the same is assumed of similar names in northern Honshū (Miller 1967:239, Shibatani 1990:3).

Language contact

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. Some 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 from Hokkaidō Ainu to Japanese and Japanese to Hokkaidō Ainu.

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (October 2009)

• Bronisław Piłsudski (1998). Alfred F. Majewicz. ed. The Aborigines of Sakhalin. The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski. I. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 792. ISBN 3-11-010928-X. 
• Hattori, Shirō, ed. (1964). Bunrui Ainugo hōgen jiten (An Ainu dialect dictionary with Ainu, Japanese, and English indexes). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten
• Miller, Roy Andrew (1967). The Japanese Language. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. 
• Murasaki Kyōko (1977, 1978). Karafuto Ainugo: Sakhalin Rayciska Ainu Dialect—Texts and Glossary (1977), Grammar (1978). Tokyo: Kokushokankōkai.
• Refsing, Kirsten (1986). The Ainu Language: The Morphology and Syntax of the Shizunai Dialect. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ISBN 8-772-88020-1. 
• Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36918-5. 
• Tamura, Suzuko (2000). The Ainu Language. Tokyo: Sanseido. ISBN 4-385-35976-8. 
• Alexander Vovin (1993). A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Brill.

Proposed classifications

• Bengtson, John D. (2006). "A multilateral look at Greater Austric." Mother Tongue (Journal) 11, 219–258.
• Georg, Stefan, Peter A. Michalove, Alexis Manaster Ramer, and Paul J. Sidwell (1999). "Telling general linguists about Altaic." Journal of Linguistics 35:65-98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000-2002). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3812-2, ISBN 0-8047-4624-9. 
• Patrie, James (1982). The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu Language. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. ISBN 0-8248-0724-3. 
• Street, John C. (1962). Review of N. Poppe, Vergleichende Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen, Teil I (1960). Language 38, 92–98.
• Vovin, Alexander (1993). A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-09905-0. 

Ainu languages test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator