Ainu languages

Hokkaidō Ainu

Hokkaidō Ainu is the group of dialects spoken by the Ainu people from modern-day Hokkaidō prefecture.^[11]: 1 It is subdivided into several smaller dialect groups 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.^{[citation needed]}

Currently, Hokkaidō Ainu is the most commonly learned variety because it has the most materials like grammatical descriptions and records available to learn it.^{[12]: 424–425} The Saru dialect is the most commonly learned by Ainu learners.^{[12]: 424–425 [9]: 40–41}

Kuril Ainu

Kuril Ainu was spoken by the Ainu people from the Kuril Islands.^[11]: 1 The dialect group is divided into Northern and Southern Kuril Ainu.^{[13]: 172–173 [14]: 65}

There are not many published documents that record information about the Kuril Ainu dialects.^{[13]: 172 [11]: 2} Torii Ryūzō collected data about the Kuril dialect.^{[9]: 30–31} Other Ainu language researchers have used Torii's work and data to create dictionaries and analyze the Ainu dialects.^{[15]: 38 [9]: 30–31} There is currently only one known document of Southern Kuril.^{[13]: 172–173} Previously unpublished documents on Kuril Ainu have been found in Russia.^{[11]: 9–10 [13]: 172–173} Researchers assume that more unpublished documents exist since some works reference unknown documents and previously unknown documents have been found in archives.^{[16]: 125–126 [11]: 9–10 [12]: 425}

Kuril Ainu is extinct.^{[17]: Map 17} The records of it contain mostly data about vocabulary and do not provide much information on grammar.^[11]: 2 Currently, people seeking to learn Kuril Ainu have to learn dialects from other regions.^{[12]: 424–425}

Sakhalin Ainu

Sakhalin Ainu is the group of dialects spoken by the Ainu people from Sakhalin.^{[11]: 1 [12]: 424–425} The dialect group comprises several distinct dialects.^{[11]: 2 [9]: 30–32} The eastern coastal dialect of Taraika, near modern Gastello in Poronaysky District, was quite divergent from the other localities.^[11]: 2 The Raychishka dialect, on the western coast near modern Uglegorsk, is the best documented and has a dedicated grammatical description.^[11]: 3

Tahkonanna, the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu, died in 1994.^{[18][14]: 59} While Sakhalin Ainu is extinct, people are using records to learn it in revival efforts.^{[12]: 424–425}

The Sakhalin Ainu dialects had long vowels and a final -h phoneme, which was pronounced [x].^{[citation needed]}

Altaic

John C. Street (1962) proposed linking Ainu, Korean, and Japanese in one family and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic in another, with the two families linked in a common "North Asiatic" family. Street's grouping was an extension of the Altaic hypothesis, which at the time linked Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, sometimes adding Korean; today Altaic sometimes includes Korean and rarely Japanese but not Ainu (Georg et al. 1999).

From a perspective more centered on Ainu, James Patrie (1982) adopted the same grouping, namely Ainu–Korean–Japanese and Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic, with these two families linked in a common family, as in Street's "North Asiatic".

Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) likewise classified Ainu with Korean and Japanese. He regarded "Korean–Japanese-Ainu" as forming a branch of his proposed Eurasiatic language family. Greenberg did not hold Korean–Japanese–Ainu to have an especially close relationship with Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic within this family.

The Altaic hypothesis is now rejected by the scholarly mainstream.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Austroasiatic

Shafer (1965) presented evidence suggesting a distant connection with the Austroasiatic languages, which include many of the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. Vovin (1992) presented his reconstruction of Proto-Ainu with evidence, in the form of proposed sound changes and cognates, of a relationship with Austroasiatic. In 1993, Vovin still regarded this hypothesis as preliminary.^[19]

Language contact with the Nivkhs

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. Linguists believe the vocabulary shared between Ainu and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing.^[29]

Language contact with the Japanese

The Ainu came into extensive contact with the Japanese in the 14th century. Analytic grammatical constructions acquired or transformed in Ainu were probably due to contact with the Japanese language. A large number of Japanese loanwords were borrowed into Ainu and to a smaller extent vice versa.^[30] There are also a great number of loanwords from the Japanese language in various stages of its development to Hokkaidō Ainu, and a smaller number of loanwords from Ainu into Japanese, particularly animal names such as rakko (猟虎, 'sea otter'; Ainu rakko), tonakai (馴鹿, 'reindeer'; Ainu tunakkay), and shishamo (柳葉魚, a fish, Spirinchus lanceolatus; Ainu susam). Due to the low status of Ainu in Japan, many ancient loanwords may be ignored or undetected, but there is evidence of an older substrate, where older Japanese words which have no clear etymology appear related to Ainu words which do. An example is modern Japanese sake or shake (鮭), meaning 'salmon', probably from the Ainu sak ipe or shak embe for 'salmon', literally 'summer food'.

According to P. Elmer (2019), the Ainu languages are a contact language, i.e. have strong influences from various Japonic dialects/languages during different stages, suggesting early and intensive contact between them somewhere in the Tōhoku region, with Ainu borrowing a large amount of vocabulary and typological characteristics from early Japonic.^[31]

Other proposals

A small number of linguists suggested a relation between Ainu and Indo-European languages, based on racial theories regarding the origin of the Ainu people. The theory of an Indo-European—Ainu relation was popular until 1960; later linguists dismissed it and concentrated on more local language families.^[32][33]

Tambovtsev (2008) proposes that Ainu is typologically most similar to Native American languages and suggests that further research is needed to establish a genetic relationship between these languages.^[34]

Ainu on mainland Japan

It is occasionally suggested that Ainu was the language of the indigenous Emishi people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu.^[b] The main evidence for this is the presence of place names 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 suspected of similar names ending in -be in northern Honshū and Chūbu, such as the Kurobe and Oyabe rivers in Toyama Prefecture.^[36] Other place names in Kantō and Chūbu, such as Mount Ashigara (Kanagawa–Shizuoka), Musashi (modern Tokyo), Keta Shrine (Toyama), and the Noto Peninsula, have no explanation in Japanese, but do in Ainu. The traditional matagi hunters of the mountain forests of Tōhoku retain Ainu words in their hunting vocabulary (see Matagi dialect).^[37][38] However, Elmer (2019) has also suggested Japonic etymologies, which supposedly got borrowed into early Ainu and lost in contemporary Japonic dialects.^[31]

The direction of influence and migration is debated. It has been proposed that at least some Jōmon period groups spoke a proto-Ainu language,^[39] and that they displaced the Okhotsk culture north from southern Hokkaido when the Ainu fled Japanese expansion into northern Honshu, with the Okhotsk ancestral to the modern Nivkh as well as a component of the modern Ainu. However, it has also been proposed that the Ainu themselves can be identified with the Okhotsk culture, and that they expanded south into northern Honshu as well as to the Kamchatka Peninsula,^[23][40] or that the Emishi spoke a Japonic language, most closely related to ancient Izumo dialect, rather than anything related to Ainu, with Ainu-speakers migrating later from Hokkaido to northern Tōhoku. The purported evidence for this are old-Japanese loanwords in the Ainu language, including basic vocabulary, as well as distinctive Japonic terms and toponyms found in Tōhoku and Hokkaido, that have been linked to the Izumo dialect.^[41]