Chapter 7Written Sources: Grammars, Dictionaries, and the Philological Record

7.1 The classical grammars

The chronological account of how the descriptive tradition developed — from the Edo-period glossaries through Batchelor and Kindaichi to the modern typological turn — is given in Chapter 6 (The History of Ainu Language Description and Previous Research). The present chapter identifies the specific works this grammar draws on: reference grammars, dictionaries and lexical resources, and the philological record. Spoken corpus sources are treated in Chapter 8 (The Oral-Literature Corpus and Spoken-Language Data).

The foundational work in the modern Japanese descriptive tradition is Kindaichi & Chiri (1936), a collaborative outline grammar by Kindaichi Kyōsuke and Chiri Mashiho. It introduced the numbered person-form system and identified the auxiliary verb paradigm and the evidential nominalizers, establishing the analytical categories that all subsequent Japanese-language description built on. Its Hokkaido dialect coverage is uneven by contemporary standards, and many of its morphological analyses have been revised since, but it remains the indispensable point of entry into the classical tradition. Chiri's separate grammar of the Sakhalin dialect Chiri (1942) falls outside this grammar's primary scope; it is cited when the Hokkaido–Sakhalin structural comparison in Chapter 162 (Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu: The External Comparison) requires a Sakhalin-side primary source.

7.2 Modern reference grammars

Refsing (1986) is the only pre-2020 monograph grammar dedicated to a single Hokkaido variety: the Shizunai dialect of the Hidaka region (SHI). It covers morphology and syntax in full paradigm tables and remains an important comparator for the Saru baseline used in this grammar, given that Shizunai belongs to the southwest Hokkaido group and the correspondences to Saru are close. For features where Shizunai and Saru diverge, dialect tags signal which variety a cited form comes from; the systematics of the southwest group are discussed in Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method).

Shibatani (1990) includes an Ainu chapter in his typological survey of the languages of Japan. The coverage is sketch-level, but its framing in terms of polysynthesis, noun incorporation, and alignment introduced Hokkaido Ainu to a wide comparative-linguistics audience. It is cited here when a brief typologically-oriented reference is needed for a structural property treated in detail in Chapter 2 (A Typological Profile of Hokkaido Ainu).

Satō (2008) is the most comprehensive Japanese-language descriptive grammar available for the Saru–Chitose core. The treatment spans phonology, the full verbal template, the person-affix system, aspect, evidentiality, nominalization, and clause linkage, with extensive paradigm tables and elicited examples. It is held locally and constitutes one of the two primary structural references throughout this grammar; its analyses of the auxiliary verb system and person forms are the starting point for the corresponding chapters.

Bugaeva (2012) provides a compact English sketch of southern Hokkaido Ainu, covering the Saru–Chitose varieties. As the most accessible single English-language overview of the core dialect group, it is cited when a concise English-language reference is needed alongside the more detailed Japanese treatments.

Bugaeva (2022) is a multi-author handbook in the De Gruyter Mouton series on the Japanese language and linguistics (HJLL 12). Its chapters, each by a specialist on a specific grammatical domain, offer the broadest cross-dialect coverage of any single reference work currently available. This grammar cites Handbook chapters under their respective author keys throughout the content chapters; where a Handbook treatment and the analyses of Satō or Nakagawa diverge, the disagreement is stated explicitly.

Nakagawa (2024) is the most recent and most comprehensive single-author grammar of the Ainu language. It covers the full range of Hokkaido dialects with attention to micro-variation, incorporates data from large annotated corpora, and provides substantial sections on syntax and discourse that earlier grammars left largely undescribed. It is held locally and serves as the principal structural reference for this grammar, particularly for the phonology, the person-marking system, the auxiliary and evidential constructions, and the formal-noun nominalization paradigm. Where the present grammar departs from Nakagawa's analysis, the departure is stated and the reasoning given.

Tamura (2000) is an English-language grammar sketch of Saru Ainu, adapted from Tamura's 1988 Japanese encyclopedia article. It is not held locally and carries the reported status explained in the section below. Structural claims that rely on it alone are cross-checked against Satō and Nakagawa; the Saru dictionary Tamura (1996) (see below) provides the primary-data complement.

7.3 Dictionaries and lexical resources

Tamura (1996) is the comprehensive Ainu–Japanese dictionary of the Saru dialect. Beyond word-forms and definitions, it records grammatical category membership, possessed forms, and aspect alternations for individual lexical items. In this grammar it functions as a primary data source for Saru morphological evidence — affiliative forms, valency-class membership, paradigm alternants — that goes beyond what the grammar texts directly supply. Although not held locally in the project corpus, individual entries are cited throughout the content chapters when lexical-paradigmatic evidence is needed.

Nakagawa (1995) and Kayano (1996) cover the Chitose and Saru dialects respectively. Both carry the reported status in this grammar; they are accessible through the db.aynu.org catalogue, and their evidence is cross-checked against Tamura (1996) and the spoken corpus where possible. Together, the three dictionaries supply the lexical–paradigmatic backbone for the Saru–Chitose core that the structural chapters draw on when individual morpheme forms are at issue.

Hattori (1964) is the comparative dialect dictionary, covering nineteen localities across Hokkaido and Sakhalin with a 200-item basic-vocabulary list per site. Its word-form data underpin all subsequent Hokkaido dialect classification, and it is cited in the dialectological chapters as a reported source. The dialect-classification literature built on it is treated in Chapter 161 (Lexical Dialectology and the Dialect Atlas).

Chiri Mashiho's multi-volume classified dictionary Chiri (1953), arranged by semantic field (plants, animals, humans), is the standard reference for cultural-semantic vocabulary and has been cited extensively in toponymic and ethnobotanical research. It is not held locally and is cited here as a reported source; structural claims resting on it alone are flagged accordingly in the relevant content chapters.

7.4 The philological record

Batchelor's Ainu–English–Japanese dictionary, first published in 1905 and revised through four editions to a fourth in 1938 Batchelor (1905); Batchelor (1938), includes a grammar sketch of the Ainu of the northwestern Hokkaido region as it was spoken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both editions are cited in this grammar with the philological witness role and the reported status: Batchelor's transcription conventions and analytical categories diverge substantially from those of the mid-century Japanese tradition, and his structural claims require verification against the Saru–Chitose baseline before they can bear analytic weight. The phonological transcription system he used is discussed in Chapter 11 (The Latin Phonemic Transcription).

The Kaga-ke monjo (加賀家文書), a collection of Edo-period manuscript records preserved at the National Ainu Museum and other repositories, contains Ainu-language material — glossaries, word lists, and transcribed phrases — predating systematic grammatical description. Fukazawa (2017) provides a philological study of this collection, and this grammar accesses Edo-period lexical and phonological evidence through that work. The Sino-Ainu glosses of the illustrated document known as the 蝦夷島奇觀 (Ezoshima kikan) are studied by Yasuoka & Yasuoka (2023), whose linguistic analysis is the entry point for that early attestation. Neither document furnishes sufficient structural data to affect grammatical analyses directly; both are relevant to the historical phonology of Chapter 156 (Proto-Ainu Reconstruction: Segments and Accent Classes), to which the interested reader is directed for their philological use.

7.5 Source gaps and the reported-evidence convention

Several works that descriptive practice requires citing are not directly consulted in this grammar: the full text is either unavailable locally or was not read in preparation for the chapter in question. These sources carry the reported marker in the auto-generated references list and are flagged with a badge wherever they appear. The convention is defined in Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions): claims that rest solely on a reported source are not treated as independently verified, and where a structural analysis depends on such a claim, an independent supporting source is required or the uncertainty is stated explicitly.

Among the grammars, Tamura (2000) is the most significant reported source: its analytic coverage of Saru is cited throughout the secondary literature, but the full text is not held in the project corpus, and its grammatical claims are consistently cross-checked against Satō (2008) and Nakagawa (2024). Among the Sakhalin-side sources, Dal Corso (2021) — a reedition of Murasaki's West Sakhalin materials with grammatical notes — is cited as reported; its evidence enters this grammar only where the Sakhalin contrast in Chapter 162 (Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu: The External Comparison) requires a philologically worked Sakhalin source.

The transcription systems, citation formats, and abbreviation conventions used throughout this grammar are set out in Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions). The relationship between the transliteration schemes of individual sources — Batchelor's romanization, the NINJAL practical orthography, Nakagawa's extended Latin transcription — and the phonemic transcription adopted here is explained in Chapter 11 (The Latin Phonemic Transcription) and Chapter 12 (Katakana Orthography and the Extended Small-Kana Codas).