Chapter 13Cyrillic and Multi-Script Rendering

13.1 Three transcriptional traditions

Scholarly and documentary work on Ainu has operated in three transcriptional traditions. The Latin phonemic transcription developed by the twentieth-century descriptive tradition is the primary script of the major reference grammars Tamura (1996); Refsing (1986); Nakagawa (2024) and of modern corpus annotation. The katakana syllabary, extended with small-kana coda characters, is the dominant script of native-speaker writing and of modern Hokkaido institutional materials; Nakagawa's annotated text editions and the NINJAL oral-literature corpus present Ainu in katakana. A third body of material, the output of the Russian scholarly tradition on Sakhalin Ainu from the early twentieth century onward, uses a Cyrillic-based transcription modelled on Russian phonographic conventions.

All Ainu forms in this grammar appear in the Latin system, normalized from whatever source script they originate in. The phoneme-to-grapheme mapping is documented in Chapter 11 (The Latin Phonemic Transcription); the katakana syllabary and its small-kana extensions are the subject of Chapter 12 (Katakana Orthography and the Extended Small-Kana Codas).

13.2 The Latin phonemic transcription

The Latin conventions followed here match the modern Hokkaido descriptive standard. The affricate phoneme is written c, not ch; the fricative phoneme s, not sh — a normalisation reflecting the absence of a palatal-vs-non-palatal phonemic contrast and now standard in scholarly and community usage Kirikae (1997); Nakagawa (2006); community discussion (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2023) (aynu-corpora Discord 2023–2026). Native-speaker writers and the major descriptive grammars converge on this choice: Kirikae's survey of Ainu-authored orthographic practice shows that speakers who wrote their language themselves consistently avoided the yōon spellings Kirikae (1997).

Prevocalic glottal onset is not marked in the modern literature; earlier transcriptions by Tamura and others marked it with an apostrophe (e.g. 'a), and an apostrophe notation persists in some corpus metadata, but the omission has been standard since the 1980s Shiraishi (2022); community discussion (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2023) (aynu-corpora Discord 2023–2026). The boundary markers = and - carry a specific contrast introduced by Nakagawa: = marks personal-index boundaries and - marks derivational boundaries. Nakagawa adopted this device in his 1986 text collection Nakagawa (2024: 49), after which its use became general; community record (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024) (aynu-corpora Discord 2023–2026). The morphological implications of the distinction — whether individual indexes are clitics or affixes — are examined in Chapter 15 (Orthographic Standardization and the Word-Division Problem).

13.3 Katakana as a parallel notation

For sources in katakana, the katakana surface form is displayed alongside the Latin morphemic analysis; the Latin form drives the interlinear glossing. Standard Japanese katakana covers most Ainu CV syllables directly. The coda consonants of closed Ainu syllables — a structural feature with no equivalent in standard Japanese orthography — are represented by small-kana characters added in the Unicode Katakana Phonetic Extensions block (U+31F0–U+31FF). The table below gives the vowel correspondences and the coda-consonant assignments; the full CV-syllable mapping, including variant representations for the affricate c and the handling of nasal assimilation, is documented in Chapter 12 (Katakana Orthography and the Extended Small-Kana Codas).

The coda -r is the only one whose small-kana character encodes the colour of the preceding vowel; the other codas each have a single character regardless of vowel context. Font support for the full Unicode coda set, including the two-character sequence ㇷ゚ for -p, varies across platforms; the practical rendering situation is surveyed in Chapter 12 (Katakana Orthography and the Extended Small-Kana Codas).

13.4 The Cyrillic tradition in Sakhalin scholarship

Russian-language academic work on Sakhalin Ainu, beginning with fieldwork by linguists such as Nikolai Nevsky in the early twentieth century, transcribed the language in Cyrillic modelled on Russian phonographic conventions, with additional characters accommodating sounds absent from Russian — a pattern familiar from Soviet minority-language orthographic policy; asserted by nukopoli (aynu-corpora Discord, 2024) (aynu-corpora Discord 2023–2026). The dominant accessible sources on Sakhalin Ainu consulted in this grammar arrive in Latin or katakana rather than Cyrillic: Piłsudski's 1912 materials use a Latin-based Romanist transcription Piłsudski (1912), Murasaki's grammar and her later introductory volume present Sakhalin Ainu in katakana Murasaki (1979); Murasaki (2025), and Dal Corso's re-edition of Murasaki's material and his study of the Piłsudski-corpus phonology apply the Latin system Dal Corso (2021); Dal Corso (2024).

Community members in the aynu-corpora orthographic discussions have proposed systematic Cyrillic correspondence tables for a normalized Sakhalin Ainu Cyrillic orthography, modelling the system on Soviet minority-language conventions (scheuewsuiski and nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, December 2024) (aynu-corpora Discord 2023–2026) ‹speculative›. No such system has entered formal institutional use. Forms from Cyrillic-script sources are transliterated to the Latin system before they appear in any example or inline context in this grammar; the structural and phonological contrasts that motivate citing Sakhalin material are treated in Chapter 162 (Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu: The External Comparison).

13.5 Script policy

The following conventions apply to all Ainu forms in this grammar: Nakagawa (2024: §0.4)

• Latin is canonical. Every Ainu form — whether cited from a Latin-script source, from a katakana source, or transliterated from a Cyrillic source — appears in the Latin phonemic transcription, in the morphemic line of an interlinear example or as an italicised inline form.
• Katakana is a parallel surface layer. For sources in katakana, the katakana surface form is shown above the Latin morphemic analysis; the Latin line drives the interlinear glossing.
• Cyrillic is excluded from the text. No Cyrillic characters appear in this grammar. Forms from Cyrillic-script sources are transliterated to the Latin system before any citation; the source is then cited in the normal way.
• Sakhalin and Kuril provenance is marked by the dialect tag. The SA or KU tag on an example — drawn from the fixed dialect-label set documented in Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions) — is the sole in-text indicator that a form is from Sakhalin or Kuril Ainu rather than Hokkaido. Japanese glosses and source titles carry Japanese attribution and are not subject to the Ainu-script conventions above.