Ainu People - Language

Language

Today, it is estimated that fewer than 100 speakers of the language remain, while other research places the number at fewer than 15 speakers – the language has been regarded as “endangered”. As a result of this the study of the Ainu language is limited and is based largely on historical research.

Although there have been attempts to show that the Ainu language and the Japanese language are related, modern scholars have rejected that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words between Japanese and Ainu. In fact, no attempt to show a relationship with Ainu to any other language has gained wide acceptance, and Ainu is currently considered to be a language isolate.

Words used as prepositions in English (such as to, from, by, in, and at) are postpositional in Ainu; they come after the word that they modify. A single sentence in Ainu can be made up of many added or agglutinated sounds or morphemes that represent nouns or ideas.

The Ainu language has had no system of writing, and has historically been transliterated by the Japanese kana or the Russian Cyrillic. Today, it is typically written in either katakana or Latin alphabet. The unwieldy nature of the Japanese kana with its inability to accurately represent terminal consonants has contributed to the degradation of the original Ainu. For example, some words, such as "Kor" (meaning "to hold"), are now pronounced with a terminal vowel sound, as in "Koro".

Many of the Ainu dialects, even from one end of Hokkaido to the other, were not mutually intelligible; however, the classic Ainu language of the Yukar, or Ainu epic stories, was understood by all. Without a writing system, the Ainu were masters of narration, with the Yukar and other forms of narration such as the Uepeker (Uwepeker) tales, being committed to memory and related at gatherings, often lasting many hours or even days.