Chapter 6The History of Ainu Language Description and Previous Research

6.1 Edo-period records and the philological tradition

The earliest systematic documentation of the Ainu language dates from the Edo period (17th–19th centuries), when Japanese interpreters and officials stationed at trading posts on Hokkaido compiled word-lists, phrase-books, and glossaries for practical administrative use. The most comprehensive of these, described by Refsing (1986: 17), is the 蝦夷方言藻汐草 (Ezo hōgen moshiogusa, 'An Ezo dialect miscellany'), compiled by the interpreter Uehara Kumajirō and the official Abe Chōzaburō and first issued in 1792. It contains roughly three thousand lexical entries organized by semantic field, a list of common phrases, and short texts, and it served as a primary reference for subsequent Japanese scholarship. The late Meiji period added further lexical resources, among them the Saru-dialect topical conversation dictionary of Kanazawa (1898).

The Edo-period manuscript tradition has received philological attention in recent scholarship. Fukazawa (2017) examines the Kaga-ke (加賀家) documents — a set of administrative and linguistic records from the Matsumae domain — in a dissertation that subjects these materials to systematic critical scrutiny. The Sino-Ainu glosses embedded in the 蝦夷島奇觀 (Ezoshima kikan) have been studied by Yasuoka & Yasuoka (2023), contributing to a digitally oriented philological programme that bridges the manuscript tradition and modern corpus resources.

These sources function primarily as practical aids for Japanese-Ainu communication rather than as linguistic analyses. They provide invaluable lexical witnesses, particularly for varieties spoken in regions where communities ceased to transmit the language before systematic recording was possible, but they contain no morphological analysis and their phonological transcriptions require careful critical interpretation. Their evidentiary status is assessed in Chapter 7 (Written Sources: Grammars, Dictionaries, and the Philological Record).

6.2 Batchelor, Piłsudski, and early Western documentation

Basil Hall Chamberlain's 1887 monograph Chamberlain (1887) marshalled detailed linguistic arguments against relating Ainu to Japanese or any Altaic family, concluding that it must be treated as genealogically unclassifiable. His points were subsequently reviewed and extended by Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and the isolate status has remained the scholarly consensus; the question is examined in Chapter 5 (The Genetic Position of Ainu: Isolate Status and Macro-Comparison Controversies).

The most influential early description available in a European language came from John Batchelor, a British Anglican missionary who spent several decades working among the Hokkaido Ainu. His dictionary — held in this project's sources in the Batchelor (1905) edition and in its final revised form of Batchelor (1938) — combined Ainu-English-Japanese glosses with a grammatical sketch, and it remained outside Japan the most accessible major source material on the language for several decades Refsing (1986: 18). Among Batchelor's contributions was a Roman-alphabet transcription system for Ainu, the most direct antecedent of the Latin-script orthographic tradition examined in Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions). The limitations of the dictionary, however, were noted by his Japanese successors: Refsing Refsing (1986: 18–19) documents Chiri Mashiho's extended criticism cataloguing mistranslations, phantom entries, and unreliable forms, and concludes that the work requires a critical and cautious approach. The grammatical sketch shares the presupposition of European missionary-grammar categories and requires verification against the later native-speaker-based record.

Bronisław Piłsudski's collection Piłsudski (1912), compiled from fieldwork on Sakhalin, supplies an early and substantial documentary record of the Sakhalin Ainu variety. The significance of that collection for Sakhalin phonetics, phonology, and morphosyntax has been reassessed in Dal Corso (2024), and the texts have been re-edited with translation and grammatical notes by Dal Corso (2021). The Sakhalin materials feature in this grammar as systematic external contrast, marked with the dialect tag sa; the historical and geographic setting shared between Hokkaido and Sakhalin Ainu is outlined in Chapter 3 (The Ainu People, Their Homeland, and History).

6.3 Kindaichi and Chiri: the classical Japanese descriptive tradition

Kindaichi Kyōsuke (1882–1971) established Ainu studies as a recognized academic discipline in Japan, bringing sustained scholarly productivity and the institutional standing of the Tokyo Imperial University to a field that had previously lacked both. His primary interest lay in the oral-literature tradition — particularly the heroic epics known as yukar — and his grammatical work was conceived as an instrument for that philological programme Kindaichi (1933). Among the textual materials he drew on were yukar notebooks compiled by the Ainu narrator Kannari Matsu, who wrote down her repertoire in romanized Ainu over several years in Kindaichi's home, eventually filling seventy notebooks Refsing (1986: 19). The oral-literature tradition itself is surveyed in Chapter 8 (The Oral-Literature Corpus and Spoken-Language Data).

Kindaichi's analytical contributions to Hokkaido Ainu grammar were substantial. Refsing identifies two advances in particular: he demonstrated that the language's person-indexing elements are personal affixes on the verb rather than the free pronouns that Batchelor's description had posited, and he distinguished the abstract nominal form from the personal-reference-bearing concrete (possessed) form — an opposition later refined by Tamura and central to the nominal morphology of this grammar Refsing (1986: 21–22).

Chiri Mashiho (1909–1961), an Ainu scholar, studied under Kindaichi at Tokyo Imperial University — the first Ainu student admitted to that institution — and his graduation thesis became the joint grammar Kindaichi & Chiri (1936), アイヌ語法概説 ('An outline of Ainu grammar'), co-authored with Kindaichi. Published in 1936, it remained the standard Japanese reference work for decades. Chiri subsequently undertook fieldwork on Sakhalin and produced a grammar centred on the Sakhalin dialects Chiri (1942). His later scholarly career turned toward lexicography and etymological research; he began a projected ten-volume classified dictionary of Ainu, completing three volumes on plants, animals, and human beings respectively before his death in 1961 Chiri (1953).

Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) compiled the first published collection of Ainu kamuy yukar (divine epics) with Japanese translations Chiri Yukie (1923), a text-publication project that established the model of romanized Ainu with facing-page translation and drew the oral-literary tradition into print for the first time.

The descriptive framework of Kindaichi and Chiri organized grammar around traditional Japanese parts-of-speech categories — noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, particle — with grammatical relations treated semantically: the analyst begins from a meaning-type (nominative, locative, dative) and asks how the language expresses it. Refsing notes that this approach presupposes categories from the analyst's prior framework rather than deriving them from the distributional behavior of Ainu morphemes, and produces a coherent overview whose ordering reflects the analyst's starting-point as much as the structure of the language Refsing (1986: 40). The contrast between this tradition and the formal-distributional analysis of Tamura is a recurring reference point in the history of Ainu grammaticography.

6.4 The modern descriptive era: Tamura, Refsing, Shibatani, and Satō

Post-war descriptive work began with two large comparative projects by Hattori Shirō. The lexicostatistic study he undertook with Chiri Mashiho surveyed 19 Ainu localities — 13 on Hokkaido, 6 on Sakhalin — using a 200-item Swadesh list and established the first quantitative basis for internal dialect classification Hattori & Chiri (1960). The Ainu dialect dictionary he subsequently edited Hattori (1964) covers the same 19 localities and remained the foundational pan-dialectal lexical resource for decades; the current state of the dialect classification that builds on that data is described in Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method). The Sakhalin variety was described in the grammar of Murasaki (1979), later re-edited and annotated by Dal Corso (2021). Asai Tōru produced a grammar of the Ishikari dialect Asai (1969), extending the descriptive record to a variety north of the Saru basin.

Tamura Suzuko — publishing through the 1950s and 1960s under her maiden name Fukuda — built the Saru dialect into the best-described variety of Hokkaido Ainu. Her early articles on Saru verbal morphology Fukuda (1956), auxiliary verbs Tamura (1960), and particle systems Fukuda (1961) applied distributional criteria to morpheme classification, departing from the semantic ordering of the Kindaichi-Chiri tradition. Refsing's comparison shows that Tamura was among the first to delimit morpheme classes by formal and positional behavior — for instance, restricting the possessed (belonging) form to a defined semantic class of nouns, where Kindaichi had treated the opposition as applicable to all nouns Refsing (1986: 22, 42–47). Her Saru-dialect dictionary Tamura (1996) remains the most comprehensive single-dialect Ainu dictionary and is used throughout this grammar as a primary lexical resource. The English-language grammar Tamura (2000) made the Saru description accessible to non-Japanese readership, though it was not available to this project for direct consultation.

Refsing's 1986 monograph Refsing (1986) on the Shizunai dialect applied the distributional programme more explicitly, organizing morpheme classes by positional evidence alone and providing substantial coverage of a Hokkaido variety otherwise under-described in the literature. Its introduction — a critical survey of the history of research through the early post-war period — is the most thorough historiography of Ainu linguistics available in English prior to the Handbook, and large parts of the historical account in the present chapter draw on that survey.

Shibatani's 1990 chapter on Ainu Shibatani (1990), in his typological survey of the languages of Japan, situated the language within the cross-linguistic typological literature at a scale that earlier descriptions had not attempted. He characterized Hokkaido Ainu as head-marking, polysynthetic, SOV, and organized for evidential distinctions through a nominalization-plus-copula construction — a characterization confirmed and refined by subsequent scholarship; see Chapter 2 (A Typological Profile of Hokkaido Ainu). His 1988 article Shibatani (1988) had placed Ainu noun incorporation within the cross-linguistic typology of polysynthesis, establishing a framework for the incorporation analysis taken up in later work.

Satō Tomomi's grammar Satō (2008) is the most comprehensive Japanese-language description since Tamura's, covering Hokkaido Ainu morphology, syntax, argument structure, valency operations, and information structure, with particular depth on the Chitose variety. Together with Tamura's Saru dictionary and grammar, it forms one of the two principal Japanese-language reference works against which this grammar triangulates its analyses.

6.5 Bugaeva, Nakagawa, and the corpus-computational turn

The scholarship of the early 21st century has advanced on two fronts simultaneously: deeper domain-specific analysis of grammatical subsystems, and the development of digitally accessible annotated corpora. Article-length studies have addressed domains that the reference grammars treated only summarily, and the resulting findings have in several cases revised or substantially refined the standard analyses.

Bugaeva Anna's research has reshaped understanding of several grammatical subsystems. Her work on Ainu applicatives Bugaeva (2006) Bugaeva (2010) provided a cross-linguistically situated analysis of the three applicative prefixes e-, ko-, and o-; her analysis of the antipassive Bugaeva (2021) placed Ainu within the comparative typology of antipassive constructions; and her work on possession Bugaeva (2021) and causatives Bugaeva (2014) has refined the standard valency analysis. Her treatment of the diachrony of anticausatives Bugaeva (2025) extends the historical dimension of the valency description. The Handbook of the Ainu language Bugaeva (2022), which she edited, assembles specialist treatments of every major domain: phonology Shiraishi (2022), verbal valency Bugaeva & Kobayashi (2022), dialectology Nakagawa & Fukazawa (2022), oral literature Endō (2022) Okuda (2022), historical and comparative linguistics Alonso de la Fuente (2022), and the revitalization movement Ōno (2022). The Handbook constitutes the most comprehensive reference work on Ainu available in English.

Nakagawa Hiroshi's Nakagawa (2024) — アイヌ語広文典 ('An extensive grammar of the Ainu language') — is the most recent single-author reference grammar of Hokkaido Ainu. It surveys the full grammatical range from phonology through complex clause-linkage, drawing primarily on Saru and Chitose data, and provides detailed paradigm tables with Japanese translation throughout. It is the primary reference grammar for this work, cited throughout by section. A critical review of its analyses and relation to earlier grammars is available in Satō (2025).

Domain-specific monographs and dissertations have contributed substantially alongside the reference grammars. Dal Corso's dissertation on Ainu evidentiality Dal Corso (2018) provided a semantico-pragmatic account of the formal-noun evidential system and a morphosyntactic analysis of its construction and clause-final frames. Historical phonology has been examined by Itabashi (2001), who established the diachronic correspondence between Sakhalin Ainu vowel length and Hokkaido Ainu pitch accent. The Handbook chapter by Alonso de la Fuente (2022) critically reviewed earlier Proto-Ainu reconstruction proposals, including those of Vovin (1993), and advanced a revised segmental and suprasegmental inventory. Dialectological classification has been reconsidered by Nakagawa & Fukazawa (2022) and in subsequent quantitative analyses.

The documentary and corpus infrastructure of Ainu linguistics has grown substantially since the 1970s. The annotated oral-literature text editions published by Nakagawa and others, the NINJAL Corpus of Ainu oral literature NINJAL (2003), and the Glossed Audio Corpus Nakagawa et al. (2016) have made the oral-narrative tradition available in digitally accessible, aligned, and partially glossed form. Natural-language-processing-oriented work, including the philological study of Sino-Ainu materials by Yasuoka & Yasuoka (2023), marks a further extension of the field's methodological range. The sources underpinning this grammar's corpus layer are described in Chapter 8 (The Oral-Literature Corpus and Spoken-Language Data) and Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method).

The revitalization movement and the emergence of new-speaker varieties constitute a distinct strand of contemporary research. Its history is surveyed in Ōno (2022) and treated in depth in Chapter 4 (The Sociolinguistic Situation: Endangerment and Revitalization). The typological profile of the language is mapped in Chapter 2 (A Typological Profile of Hokkaido Ainu), and the genetic-relationship question is treated in Chapter 5 (The Genetic Position of Ainu: Isolate Status and Macro-Comparison Controversies).