Chapter 145Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers

145.1 Genre allocation and narrator sex

The most thoroughly documented gender dimension of Hokkaido Ainu is the performance norm that distributes oral-literary genres by the sex of the traditional narrator. Satō's table for Chitose specifies narrator sex as a genre-diagnostic parameter alongside melody, sakehe ‘refrain’, and rhythm-tapping Satō (2008: 259); Endō's synthesis confirms the same allocation across the Hidaka–Iburi region and notes that the norm applies to both the content and the formal-poetic apparatus of each genre Endō (2022).

(After Satō (2008: 259) and Endō (2022).) The allocation is not symmetrically two-way. Several genres are open to performers of either sex; the two genres allocated exclusively to men are heroic verse (yukar) and prayer (kamuy nomi). Prayer is improvised with a personal melody and structurally distinct from the fixed, shared incantation, which any speaker may perform Endō (2022).

Genre norms operated as conventions, and their social character is clear from modern practice: Endō notes that modern revitalization recordings document women reciting verse yukar; the performers themselves recognized this as a departure from tradition Endō (2022). The grammar and genre taxonomy of each form, including the narrator-person conventions and the sakehe refrain, are treated in Chapter 149 (The Oral-Literature Genre System and Its Grammatical Signatures), Chapter 151 (The Sakehe Refrain, Verse Meter, and the Structure of Sung Verse), and Chapter 169 (Glossed Verse: A Yukar Heroic Epic and a Kamuy Yukar God-Song).

145.2 The menoko yukar — women's heroic verse

The menokoyukar ‘women's heroic verse’ retains the verse architecture of the standard yukar — notably the sakehe ‘refrain’ — while replacing the battle theme with marriage. Its female protagonist holds the same superhuman capacities as the male hero of the standard epic, including tusu ‘shamanistic foresight and revival power’, but the narrative turns on a marriage outcome Endō (2022). The genre is documented for mid-Saru (沙流中流); its presence in other Hokkaido regions is not established from the sources read for this chapter ‹speculative›.

A Saru speaker's metalinguistic testimony illustrates the sakehe distinction. 川上まつ子 described the menoko yukar as a genre one properly performs with the sakehe, and noted that she was narrating one without it — treating it as an uwepeker — and that with the sakehe the performance would be long, whereas without it, short (AA研アイヌ語資料 「menokoyukar 神謡6（節なし）」, 沙流, aa-irc/019, ll. 0, 66). This metalinguistic testimony aligns with Satō's genre-feature table Satō (2008: 259): the sakehe defines the genre boundary, not the thematic content. A speaker switching off the refrain performs the same story in a different register.

Grammatically, the menoko yukar is not differentiated from the male-narrator yukar by any morphological marker of the narrator's sex. Both use the fourth-person narrator voice (a=/=an) and the elevated register (atomte-itak ‘ornamented/elegant language’) in the same way Endō (2022); Satō (2008: 259). The narrator fourth person and its logophoric function in oral epic are described in Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse); the elevated register and its grammatical hallmarks in Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction).

145.3 Gendered ritual speech-acts

Two sets of thanks-expressions and accompanying gestures are sex-differentiated in traditional practice. When receiving food or a gift, women say hinna ‘thanks/gratitude’ (lower-Saru hunna) while performing raymik ‘index-finger nose-stroke gesture’, stroking below the nose with the index finger; men perform onkami ‘reverential bow with both hands’ without this interjection. A lesser degree of gratitude uses hioy'oy; a stronger reduplicated form hinna hinna marks stronger feeling (scale: hioy'oy < hinna hinna). Formal thanks in ceremonial contexts uses iyayiraykere, applicable by either sex aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-12-26; asserted; consistent with Endō's account of gendered oral-literature performance Endō (2022)) ‹corpus-suggested›.

A revitalization-era speaker attests the full gesture-and-word complex in use: the palm-up hand motion accompanies the interjection, and the speaker describes it as a candidate for animated depiction:

The women's formal greeting gesture is likewise attested in the oral-literary register, where a female narrator describes performing raymik as part of the conventionalised greeting routine of oral narrative:

The greeting irankarapte was traditionally a man's formula, delivered with onkami. In the revitalization period it has come into gender-neutral use, recognized by speakers as a shift from traditional practice Bugaeva (2022). These gendered formulae belong to the broader system of deferential address that includes the honorific fourth-person forms and prayer-specific epithets for the deities, treated in Chapter 154 (Honorific, Ritual, and Taboo Registers) and Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person).

145.4 Sentence-final particles and gendered interactional register

Whether specific sentence-final particles carry a sex-of-speaker feature in Hokkaido Ainu — a structural parallel to the Japanese feminine わ versus masculine ぞ/ぜ — cannot be answered from the sources read for this chapter. Satō Satō (2008), Endō Endō (2022), and Nakagawa Nakagawa (2024) supply no systematic gender-indexed inventory of sentence-final particles for Hokkaido Ainu, and a search of the grammar literature yielded no attested sex-conditioned particle pair ‹speculative›. For the pedagogical grammar, Ijäs likewise addresses Hokkaido speech norms without specifying gendered SFP contrasts Ijäs (2023).

Three primary sources that might bear on this question were not read for this chapter: Fukuda's (Tamura's) 1961 description of the Saru SFP system Fukuda (1961), Kindaichi's writings on elegant-language and genre-specific grammar Kindaichi (1935), and Hattori's 1957 monograph on the 'special language of the older generations' (nenchōshasō tokushugo), the primary source on age- and register-conditioned lexical repertoires. These constitute the main empirical gap. Any future study would need to work from conversational recordings, which are sparse in the available Hokkaido documentation relative to the predominantly oral-literary aligned corpus.

The SFP inventory — na, wa, ne, ya, he and their illocutionary values — is treated without sex-of-speaker stratification in Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force). The evidential formal nouns that grammaticalize into sentence-final positions (ruwe, hawe) are covered in Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema).

145.5 Honorific and age-conditioned registers

Age- and status-conditioned register is distinct from sex-of-speaker conditioning and is better documented. The fourth-person affix set (a=/=an) functions as a second-person honorific in respectful address, drawing on the same forms that serve as the narrator's voice in oral epic Satō (2008: 261). Satō lists the elegant-language pronoun set — asinuma, aoka(y), eani, ecioka(y) — as drawn from the fourth-person paradigm and used in contexts of respectful address without sex-specificity Satō (2008: 261). The full treatment of these honorific-fourth-person forms is in Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person); their intersection with kinship-term morphology in Chapter 48 (Kinship and Honorific Possession).

Kindaichi's genre-density ranking — the density of elegant-language features increases from greetings through prayer and incantation to negotiation (caranke ‘formal dispute-resolution oratory’) and peaks in heroic verse Kindaichi (1935) (via Endō (2022)) — overlaps with the narrator-sex allocation above: prayer and heroic verse, the male-allocated genres, occupy the high-density end of the scale. The elegant register (atomte itak) and its grammatical hallmarks — applicative case-marking by prefix rather than particle, number-agreement override, and the distinct poetic lexicon — are described in Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction). The register is not itself sex-indexed: a narrator of either sex performing a genre that uses atomte itak uses the same elevated morphology ‹consensus›.

145.6 Reliability of the record and open questions

The gendered-register evidence for Hokkaido Ainu stratifies by quality. Genre allocation by narrator sex rests on genre tables, fieldwork descriptions, and native metalinguistic statements extending from early twentieth-century documentation through Satō's Chitose-based grammar Satō (2008: 259) and Endō's Handbook synthesis Endō (2022); it is the most robustly documented layer. The ritual speech-act differentiation (hinna/onkami) is attested in community discussion consistent with the ethnographic picture but would benefit from independent primary documentation. Sentence-final particle gender-indexing remains open and unconfirmed ‹speculative›.

Two further documentary gaps limit what can be said. First, Hattori 1957 on the elders' special register — the key inventory of age- and sex-conditioned non-everyday vocabulary — is not held in the project repository and was not read; Fukuda/Tamura 1961 Fukuda (1961) on Saru SFPs and Kindaichi Kindaichi (1935) on elegant language are held but were not read for this chapter. Second, the aligned Hokkaido corpus is overwhelmingly oral-literary and genre-coded, so conversational distribution of any potential gendered particle cannot be quantified from it directly. Together these gaps mean that a strong claim about sex-indexed particles or a full inventory of gendered register features in Hokkaido Ainu remains beyond what the present evidence supports.

Revitalization-era usage may be leveling some traditional allocations. The irankarapte greeting is the clearest documented case; it is possible but undocumented that other sex-specific formulae are similarly shifting Bugaeva (2022) ‹speculative›. The sociolinguistic context of the revitalization is treated in the opening chapter of the grammar.