Chapter 3The Ainu People, Their Homeland, and History

3.1 The ethnonym Aynu and related designations

The word aynu is a common noun meaning 'person, human being'; it is also the ethnic self-designation of the people whose language this grammar describes Janhunen (2022: §2.4); Shibatani (1990: §1.1). In its ethnic use the term identifies a person as a member of the Ainu community, as distinct from the gods (kamuy), and marks the boundary against neighbouring peoples. Its territorial correlate is Ainu Moshir (aynu mo-sir) 'Ainu land', the indigenous name for the homeland Janhunen (2022: §2.4).

A second self-referential term, utar 'people', appears in affiliative form as utari 'relatives, our people'; it was used as the basis for the name of the Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai (北海道ウタリ協会), the main Ainu civic organization for much of the twentieth century Janhunen (2022: §2.4). The Sakhalin Ainu have a distinct self-designation, enciw, which their modern descendants in Japan have adopted as a distinguishing label Janhunen (2022: §2.4).

The exonym "Ainu" (in older literature also "Aino") is now standard in both Japanese and international usage. Through much of the twentieth century the Japanese government applied the term 旧土人 (kyū-dojin, 'former aborigines') in official documents, most notably as part of the 1899 legislation that governed the Ainu's legal status Ōno (2022: §2). This usage was formally abandoned with the abolition of that legislation in 1997. Within the Hokkaido Ainu community, the relative weight of "Ainu" versus "Utari" as preferred public designations was contested during the 1980s and 1990s, and the discussion reflects continuing negotiations over political identity ‹contested›.

3.2 The Ainu homeland and its historical range

Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, was the core of the historical Ainu territory Janhunen (2022: §2.1); Shibatani (1990: §1.1). The same ethnic population extended across the full chain of the Kuril Islands and across the southern half of Sakhalin (Japanese: Karafuto; Ainu: Karapto); a marginal Ainu presence on the southernmost tip of Kamchatka is also attested in ethnonymic and archaeological sources Janhunen (2022: §2.1).

Evidence for an earlier, more southerly range on Honshu comes principally from toponymy. The endings -nay ‘river, brook’ and -pet ‘river’, both characteristic of Hokkaido river names, appear in dense clusters across the Tōhoku and Kantō regions, pointing to Ainu (or an immediately ancestral variety) having been spoken well south of Hokkaido at some period Shibatani (1990: §1.1); Chiri (1956). Linguistic borrowing evidence — potential Ainu-derived words in early Japonic texts — has been advanced as additional support for a Honshu range Vovin (2022), though the direction and scale of those loans remain a matter of specialist debate ‹contested›. The southern limit of former Ainu territory on Honshu cannot be fixed with precision on present evidence ‹contested›. The genetic position of the language within this spatial history is treated in Chapter 5 (The Genetic Position of Ainu: Isolate Status and Macro-Comparison Controversies).

Within Hokkaido the Ainu dialect cluster is internally diverse: the dialects of the Saru, Chitose, Ishikari, Tokachi, Horobetsu, Shizunai, Asahikawa, and Yakumo areas differ phonologically and morphologically in ways that the corpus chapters track in detail. Sakhalin Ainu (abbreviated SA in this grammar) and the now-extinct Kuril variety (KU) are cited comparatively; the dialect sample and method are set out in Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method).

3.3 Subsistence, society, and the documentary record

Ainu subsistence in the historical period centred on fishing, hunting, and gathering, with strong seasonal and ecological patterning Shibatani (1990: §1.1); Janhunen (2022: §2.5). Settlement followed rivers and coastlines, and the vocabulary reflects this orientation: the various stages of the salmon's life cycle are distinguished by roughly twenty distinct lexical items, and some fifty words for harbour seals and more than twenty for types of whale point to the centrality of sea-mammal hunting in the coastal zones Shibatani (1990: §1.1). Among land animals, bears held a special ceremonial role: the word kamuy ‘god, bear’ serves both as the generic term for the divine and as a specific designation for the bear, which was understood as a mountain god that brought its meat to the village Shibatani (1990: §1.1). Dogs figure prominently in subsistence and ceremony alike.

The precolonial Ainu maintained a diversified economy that also included small-scale horticulture and, via the Santan trade, the exchange of furs, dried fish, and lacquerware for metal goods and silk manufactured further inland on the Asian continent Janhunen (2022: §2.5). Population size is uncertain for the precolonial period; a figure close to 25,000, possibly more, has been suggested for Hokkaido alone Janhunen (2022: §2.5).

A rich tradition of oral literature — the heroic epics called yukar ‘heroic epic’, the divine epics called kamuy yukar ‘divine epic’, and the prose folktales called uwepeker ‘prosaic folktale’ — was the principal medium for transmitting cultural knowledge and was performed in a register distinct from everyday speech. The oral tradition and its register differences are directly relevant to grammar because the kamuy yukar corpus contains the densest concentration of older morphological forms and archaic vocabulary. The oral-literature genres and their linguistic properties are treated in the corpus chapters; the grammatical differences between the oral-literary and colloquial registers appear throughout the descriptive chapters.

3.4 The archaeological background: from Jōmon to the historical Ainu

The ancestors of the historical Ainu arrived on Hokkaido in connection with the Satsumon culture (c. 700–1200 CE), an archaeological complex that spread northward from Honshu and replaced the earlier local Epi-Jōmon traditions in southern Hokkaido Janhunen (2022: §3). The linguistic lineage that became Ainu has roots in the Jōmon period on Honshu; Ainu can therefore be described as a "Jōmonic" language in the sense that it likely preserves features that were broadly characteristic of pre-Yayoi Japan Janhunen (2022: §3a). As a consequence, Hokkaido itself is a secondary territory for the Ainu; their earlier homeland was on Honshu, from which the Satsumon complex — and the ancestral Ainu language — was displaced northward by the Yayoi and subsequent Yamato expansion Janhunen (2022: §3).

The Satsumon expansion on Hokkaido encountered the Okhotsk culture (c. 600–1600 CE), a littoral and maritime complex that had spread to northern Hokkaido from Sakhalin Janhunen (2022: §3). The interaction and gradual absorption of Okhotsk populations by the Satsumon bearers contributed both genetic and cultural material — and potentially some linguistic features — to the complex that became the historically attested Ainu ethnicity. The chronology of the Ainu territorial expansion can be traced approximately from this archaeological evidence: northern Hokkaido was under Ainu ethnic domination by roughly 1000 CE; southern Sakhalin was reached by roughly 1300 CE; and the Kurile Islands, including the Northern Kuriles, were occupied by Ainu speakers as late as c. 1500–1600 CE Janhunen (2022: §3). All these dates are approximations, and the specific identification of the Satsumon bearers as Ainu-speakers rests on an inference from archaeological continuity rather than direct linguistic evidence ‹contested›.

3.5 Contact history: the Matsumae domain and Russian expansion

Japanese contact with the Ainu of southern Hokkaido predates formal political control by centuries. The earliest surviving written records of the language, including the Matsumae no koto — Ezo kotoba no koto of c. 1600 with 117 words compiled for use by merchants, come from this trade context Refsing (1986: 17). The Matsumae domain (松前藩), established at the southern tip of Hokkaido under Tokugawa authority, held a monopoly on trade with the Ainu through the Edo period; Ainu communities in the interior of the island and in the Kurile Islands remained outside this domain's political control Janhunen (2022: §2.1). Commerce in furs, dried fish, and eagle feathers constituted the principal economic link between the Ainu and the Japanese domains. Episodic tensions over trade terms escalated into armed conflicts, most notably the Shakushain War of 1669–1672 and the Menashi-Kunashir uprising of 1789, both of which ended with Ainu defeat and tightened Matsumae control ‹contested› (the interpretation of Ainu agency and objectives is debated).

The broader trade network extending from Sakhalin into the Amur basin and ultimately connecting with Qing China — the Santan trade (山丹交易) — supplied the Ainu with metal goods and silk in exchange for northern products Janhunen (2022: §2.1). This trade also fostered sustained contact between the Sakhalin Ainu and their Nivkh and Uilta neighbours, the linguistic traces of which are reviewed in the Handbook's chapter on language contact Shiraishi & Tangiku (2022). Russian exploration and colonization of Kamchatka from the early eighteenth century brought a second colonial power into contact with the Kurile Ainu; Sakhalin was transferred from Manchu to Russian control by the Treaty of Peking (1860), and the island's status was subsequently settled between Japan and Russia by the Treaty of St. Petersburg (1875), which assigned Sakhalin to Russia and the Kurile Islands to Japan Janhunen (2022: §2.1).

3.6 Meiji-era annexation and assimilation policies

The formal annexation of Hokkaido by the Meiji state and its opening to Japanese colonization in 1869–1870 ended the Ainu's position as the dominant population of the island within a few decades Janhunen (2022: §2.1). Japanese settler immigration proceeded rapidly: from a figure close to the precolonial Ainu population of roughly 25,000, settlers came to outnumber the Ainu by an ever-growing margin Janhunen (2022: §2.5). The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 (北海道旧土人保護法) placed the Ainu in a defined legal category as wards of the state, assigned them small agricultural land plots, and legislated their assimilation into Japanese society Ōno (2022: §2). No formal legal prohibition of the Ainu language was enacted, but the use of the language was restricted or effectively banned in schools, and children were pressured to learn Japanese in place of Ainu; administrative discrimination reinforced the suppression of public language use Ōno (2022: §2).

The human cost of this period appears in the census figures available, though the figures must be read with awareness that assimilation policy itself distorted their collection. The 1940 census recorded 16,170 Ainu in Hokkaido; the 1935 census put the Sakhalin Ainu population at 1,512; the Kurile Ainu were relocated to Shikotan in 1884, and by 1933 only forty-one descendants survived — that variety of Ainu is now extinct Shibatani (1990: §1.1). After 1945, Sakhalin Ainu communities were evacuated to Hokkaido; the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu died in 1994 Janhunen (2022: §2.3). Intercommunal marriage and the discontinuation of Ainu census categories make reliable demographic estimates for the late twentieth century difficult; figures reported in earlier surveys suggest a population of roughly 16,000 to 24,000 persons with Ainu ancestry in Hokkaido, with wide uncertainty depending on self-identification criteria ‹contested›. By the second half of the twentieth century the language had ceased to be transmitted to children in most Hokkaido communities Ōno (2022: §2). The present sociolinguistic situation and the documentation record are taken up in Chapter 4 (The Sociolinguistic Situation: Endangerment and Revitalization).

3.7 From the 1997 law to the 2019 recognition

The 1899 act was abolished in 1997, when the Japanese Diet enacted the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (アイヌ文化の振興並びにアイヌの伝統等に関する知識の普及 及び啓発に関する法律). This legislation provided institutional funding for cultural activities and language classes for the first time, but did not recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people with specific rights Ōno (2022: §6). A unanimous resolution by the Japanese parliament in 2008 recognized the Ainu as the indigenous people of Japan, though without statutory force Janhunen (2022: §1). The Act on Promoting Measures to Realize a Society in Which the Pride of the Ainu People Is Respected, enacted in April 2019, superseded the 1997 act: it provides the statutory definition of the Ainu as an indigenous people, establishes support mechanisms for cultural and language activities, and authorized the establishment of the National Ainu Museum (Upopoy), which opened in Shiraoi in 2020 Ōno (2022: §7). The linguistic implications of revitalization policy — including the standardization pressures that accompany institutionalized language classes and the rise of new-speaker varieties — are discussed in Chapter 4 (The Sociolinguistic Situation: Endangerment and Revitalization).

The documentary record that this grammar draws on is a product of this entire history: the bulk of the attested Hokkaido Ainu material was collected in the early-to-mid twentieth century from elderly speakers in communities where the language was already in decline. The unevenness of that record — richer for some dialects (Saru, Chitose) and thinner for others — directly shapes what can and cannot be described with confidence, and the corpus chapters note coverage gaps as they arise. The history of Ainu language description and the main grammars and dictionaries consulted in this work are surveyed in Chapter 6 (The History of Ainu Language Description and Previous Research); the corpus method and dialect sample are set out in Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method).