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Ainu language

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For the language spoken in Central Asia, see Aini language.
Ainu
アイヌ イタク Aynu itak 
Pronunciation: IPA: ai̯nu itak̚
Spoken in: Japan, Russia 
Region: Hokkaido, formerly Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and Tōhoku in Honshū
Total speakers: near-extinct, 15 speakers in Japan were known in 1991<ref>SIL Ethnologue, 15th edition (2005)</ref>
Language family: language isolate
 Ainu
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ain</tt> <ref>ISO 639-2/RA Change Notice - Codes for the representation of names of languages (Library of Congress). Retrieved on November 15, 2005.</ref>
ISO/FDIS 639-3: ain 
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

The Ainu language (Ainu: アイヌ イタク, aynu itak; Japanese: アイヌ語 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 Honshū, and the southern half of Sakhalin.

Contents

[edit] 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. Evidence from studies of the genetics of Ainu and other world populations tend to hint that the Ainu people, and therefore also their language, may have some distant connection to Japanese, Koreans, or Turkic peoples of Central Asia, but it is clear from all forms of inquiry that the Ainu people and language have a very long history of isolation and independent development. They do appear, however, to have experienced some intensive contact with the Nivkhs during the course of their history; it is not known to what extent this might have affected the Ainu language.

[edit] 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)[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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.

[edit] 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 p   t   k ʔ
Affricate     ts      
Nasal m   n      
Fricative     s     h
Approximant   w   j    
Tap/flap     ɾ      

The glottal stop /ʔ/ only occurs at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel. The sequence /ti/ is realized as [ʧi] and /s/ becomes [ʃ] before /i/ and at the end of syllables. The affricate /ts/ has voiced and post-alveolar variants. There is some variation among dialects; in the Sakhalin dialect, syllable-final /p, t, k, r/ lenited and merged into /x/. After an /i/, this /x/ is pronounced as [ç].

There is a pitch accent system. The accentuation of specific words varies somewhat from dialect to dialect. Generally, words including affixes 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Writing

Officially, the Ainu language is written in a modified version of the Japanese katakana syllabary. There is also a Latin-based alphabet in use. The Ainu Times publishes in both. In the Latin orthography, /ts/ is spelt c and /j/ as y; /ʔ/, 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 boundaries, such as after a prefix.

The Unicode character range Katakana Phonetic Extensions (31F0–31FF) <ref>Katakana Phonetic Extensions - Test for Unicode support in Web browsers. Retrieved on November 15, 2005.</ref>, <ref>The Unicode Standard, 4.1. Retrieved on November 15, 2005.</ref> 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 ク ku used for アイヌイタク Aynu itak.

[edit] Oral literature

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

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

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[edit] References

  • Patrie, James (1982). The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu Language. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. ISBN 0-8248-0724-3.
  • Tamura, Suzuko (2000). The Ainu Language. Tokyo: Sanseido. ISBN 4-385-35976-8.
  • Vovin, Alexander (1993). A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-09905-0.
  • Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36918-5.
  • 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.

[edit] External links

zh-min-nan:Ainu-gú be:Мова айну br:Ainoueg ca:Ainu (llengua) cs:Ainu (jazyk) de:Ainu (Sprache) es:Idioma ainu eo:Ajnua lingvo eu:Ainuiko fr:Aïnu gl:Ainu ko:아이누어 os:Айнаг æвзаг it:Lingua ainu he:שפת איינו la:Lingua Ainuana lt:Ainų kalba ms:Bahasa Ainu nl:Ainu (taal) ja:アイヌ語 no:Ainu-språk nds:Ainu (Spraak) pl:Język ajnuski pt:Aino (língua) ru:Айнский язык scn:Lingua ainu fi:Ainun kieli sv:Ainu (språk) vi:Tiếng Ainu zh:阿伊努語

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