Chapter 154Honorific, Ritual, and Taboo Registers

154.1 Overview: a three-axis register system

Hokkaido Ainu speech is sociolinguistically stratified along three partially independent axes. The poetic/everyday axis — the contrast between atomte-itak ‘decorated/ornamented language’ (雅語, poetic–elegant register) and yayan-itak ‘ordinary language’ (日常語/口語) — is the broadest division, shared across verse and prayer genres; its archaic morphology and formulaic vocabulary are treated in Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction), and the genre system that controls which register is appropriate is described in Chapter 149 (The Oral-Literature Genre System and Its Grammatical Signatures). The honorific/deferential axis, realized through the fourth-person address forms and the associated pronoun set, is analysed formally in Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person) and Chapter 48 (Kinship and Honorific Possession). The ritual-substitution and taboo axis, in which specific vocabulary items are replaced or avoided in ceremonial, deity-address, or kinship contexts, is the focus of the present chapter, set against the sociolinguistic conditioning shared by all three axes.

The three axes do not constitute a clean binary of "high" versus "low" language. Nakagawa (2001) (via (Endō 2022)) argues that elegant and everyday Ainu occupy positions on a continuum keyed to verse-vs-prose and fixedness-vs-improvisation, and proposes that a classification by genre-type — yukar-specific phrases versus prayer-specific phrases — may be more analytically effective than the elegant/everyday dichotomy alone ‹contested›. The substitution phenomena treated here are social rather than metrical: the determining factor is the relationship between speaker and addressee — between worshipper and deity, between kin-avoidance pairs, between the hunter and the spirit of the quarry.

154.2 The honorific address system: fourth-person forms and the pronoun set

The deferential or honorific address register routes second-person reference through the fourth-person prefix a= and suffix =an rather than the everyday second-person affixes, producing a construction where 'you did X' or 'you are Y' is morphologically encoded as if the agent were fourth-person Satō (2008: 261); Bugaeva (2012: 474–476). The same prefix-set indexes the indefinite agent-defocusing function in everyday speech and the first-person hero-narrator in oral literature; its deferential reading arises specifically in contexts where the referent is identifiable and the social relationship calls for deference — address to an elder, to a chief (nispa), or to a deity (see Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person) and Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms)).

A dedicated honorific pronoun set co-occurs with these verbal affixes. Satō (2008: 261) lists the following elegant-register second-person pronouns for the Chitose variety:

The everyday second-person pronouns eani and ecioka(y) share morphological origin with the second-person verbal affixes. The honorific alternatives asinuma and aoka(y) are drawn from the fourth-person paradigm and function as free pronouns in deferential speech — between a junior and a senior speaker, or between a human worshipper and a divine interlocutor Satō (2008: 261). The structural convergence of the honorific second-person, the indefinite agent-defocusing, and the oral-literary hero-narrator on a single morphological paradigm is the subject of Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person); for the distribution by genre see Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse).

The permissive–sociative causative -yar functions additionally as a register device in formal speech: the causee, when it is the deferential addressee, may be left implicit rather than named directly, heightening the indirection appropriate to the social relationship Satō (2008: 261). This strategy is treated in Chapter 77 (The Permissive/Sociative Causative -yar).

154.3 Elegant kinship terms as register diagnostics

A small set of kinship terms participates in the everyday/elegant distinction as straightforward register alternants. The terms ona ‘father (literary/elegant)’ and unu ‘mother (literary/elegant)’ are the literary or elegant (文語的雅語) kin terms for 'father' and 'mother', attested in verse and formal contexts; the everyday equivalents haca ‘father (colloquial)’ and hapo ‘mother / father (colloquial, dialect-variable)’ vary more strongly by dialect and belong primarily to everyday speech Endō (2022); aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2026-06-15, asserted). The possessed forms onaha ‘someone's father’ and unuhu ‘someone's mother’ are the grammatically standard affiliative kin-noun forms; the collective compounds onautari ‘fathers / parents’ and unuutari ‘mothers / parents’ each carry the extended meaning 'parents (both)' alongside the primary 'fathers' and 'mothers' readings aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2026-06-15, asserted) ‹corpus-suggested›. In the oral-literary register these forms surface with the fourth-person possessive prefix a= in a dignified self-reference, as when a narrator names her parents as deities:

The colloquial term hapo shows conspicuous dialect variation: it means 'mother' in most Hokkaido varieties but 'father' in Chitose and Horobetsu, while in the Kuril varieties it denotes 'elder sibling' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (thegodofneet, 2026-06-08, asserted, citing Chiri Mashiho's comparative data). This lexical instability of the colloquial terms against the relative stability of the elegant pair ona/unu across verse traditions provides a further diagnostic value for the register distinction: the literary terms are fixed precisely where the colloquial terms shift. The possessive morphology and the full kinship-possession system are treated in Chapter 48 (Kinship and Honorific Possession).

154.4 Prayer language: genre-conditioned lexical substitution

The most extensively documented register-substitution phenomenon in Hokkaido Ainu is the genre-conditioned alternation of fire-deity epithets across the performance contexts of divine epic and prayer. In kamuy yukar (divine epic), the fire deity is addressed as ape huci ‘fire grandmother’, the kin-term-based epithet shared with everyday speech. In formal prayer (kamuy nomi / inonno itak), the same deity is addressed by the relational epithet i-resu huci ‘grandmother who raised me’ or i-resu kamuy ‘deity who raised me’, and the prayer text of 鍋沢モトゾウ (Motoanrek, Monbetsu) preserves an additional prayer-only form, mosir kor huci ‘grandmother who rules the land’, described in Endō (2022) as "not found in any other genre". Conversely, the modifier kamuy ‘splendid / divine (intensifier in heroic epic)’ functioning as an intensifier glossed 'splendid' occurs in the heroic epic but is absent from prayer Endō (2022). The full inventory of substitution pairs for this deity is:

The relational epithet i-resu huci encodes the deity-to-worshipper bond explicitly: the prefix i- (antipassive / indefinite-object marker) indexes 'me' as the implicit object, so the form is lexically 'the grandmother who raised [me]', positioning the prayer as a speech-act by a person acknowledging filial dependence on the deity. Using the everyday ape huci in formal prayer would constitute a register mismatch; the substitution is not stylistic variation but a categorical genre requirement Endō (2022).

Prayer language is morphologically marked beyond the lexical substitutions. The inonno itak register is applicative-heavy, encoding the case frame of the verb by applicative prefixes (e-, o-, ko-) rather than by case particles — a hallmark of atomte-itak generally, but especially concentrated in prayer Satō (2008: 263). The prayer text cited in Endō (2022) (§2.3) preserves doubled applicative prefixes on a single verb:

The formal sentence-final frame ruwe tapan ‘(it is a recognized fact that) …’ marks utterances as ceremonial assertions in ritual speech contexts, carrying the assertive-present reading appropriate to public declaration rather than the ordinary inferential use of ruwe ne Tamura (1996: s.v. ruwe). The evidential system underpinning this frame is described in Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema) and Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential); a fully glossed prayer text is given in Chapter 170 (A Glossed Inonno-itak (Ritual Prayer)).

154.5 The indirection principle: taboo on direct deity–human speech

Satō (2008: 259–261) proposes that the non-everyday person marking in Ainu oral literature — the use of fourth-person a=/=an where everyday first-person would use ku= — is rooted in a cultural taboo: a deity or spirit (kamuy) addressing a living human directly transgresses a boundary, and the non-everyday person marking softens that transgression by increasing indirectness. Satō labels this the indirection principle (間接性の原理), contrasting it with the standard "shamaness-oracle origin" (巫女の託宣起源) theory and presenting it explicitly as a hypothesis rather than an established result ‹speculative›. For the heroic and divine epic genres that most visibly deploy this device, see Chapter 169 (Glossed Verse: A Yukar Heroic Epic and a Kamuy Yukar God-Song).

Whether or not Satō's diachronic hypothesis is accepted, the synchronic functional overlap between the fourth person's honorific use (deferential address to human superiors) and its oral-literary use (narration by divine or supernatural heroes) is structurally coherent: both exploit the same fourth-person paradigm to mediate the speech-act through a form not claimed by the ordinary grammatical first person of the interaction. The prayer epithet alternation described above operates on the same logic at the lexical level: the worshipper who addresses the fire deity as i-resu huci rather than ape huci likewise routes the address through a relational frame encoding the deity's prior act toward the worshipper, rather than naming the deity in a neutral noun Endō (2022).

154.6 Gendered ritual speech-acts

Ritual speech-acts are differentiated by the performer's sex in ways that partly overlap with, and partly extend beyond, the narrator-gender allocation for oral-literary genres (treated in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers)). Two complementary deferential-acknowledgment acts are documented for the Saru basin: women utter hinna ‘thank you, how kind (women's word)’ (lower-Saru variant: hunna; degree form hioy'oy ‘light thanks / how nice’ < hinna hinna) while performing raymik ‘stroke below the nose with the index finger (gesture of receiving)’, a gesture of acceptance offered when receiving food or a gift; men instead perform onkami ‘bow with both hands together (gesture of reverence)’. The formal general thanks-form iyayiraykere ‘formal expression of gratitude’ is unmarked for gender aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-12-26, asserted).

The polite greeting irankarapte ‘formal greeting (lit. let me gently touch your heart)’ was traditionally a male greeting accompanied by onkami; its current use across genders in contemporary Ainu speech is described as a "transformed usage" in the context of revitalization Endō (2022). Prayer (kamuy nomi) is performed exclusively by adult men; seated songs (upopo) are primarily women's performative domain Endō (2022). The sentence-final particles associated with each genre and gender are treated in Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force).

154.7 Taboo vocabulary: attested existence and the source gap

The existence of a special taboo vocabulary in Hokkaido Ainu — restricted word-forms for hunting, bear-ceremony, and kinship-avoidance contexts — is attested independently in several sources. Tamura (2000) catalogues "special terminology including taboo and prayer words" as a vocabulary class of the language. The 1795 Edo-period record Ezoki is reported in Bugaeva (2022) as describing "a kind of secret language" observed among Ainu speakers — an early external testimony to a restricted speech variety.

The primary monographic treatment of this vocabulary is Hattori (1957), "Special language of the older generations among the Ainu" (nenchōshasō tokushugo, 年長者層特殊語), which was not held or consulted in the preparation of this grammar. No systematic hunting-substitute or in-law name-avoidance word list was recoverable from the read grammars or the aligned corpus ‹speculative›. What the sources consulted make available is the mechanism — lexical substitution by a genre- or context-conditioned alternate form — and several attested examples from the prayer and epic registers, as described above. The hunting and bear-ceremony vocabulary, and the kinship-avoidance pairs, remain a gap pending access to Hattori (1957) and to the taboo-marked entries in Tamura (1996).

Structurally, the attested substitution cases share a common property: the replacement is a different lexeme or an elaborated periphrastic construction, not a phonological modification of the everyday form. This is illustrated by the elegant-register periphrases documented in Satō (2008: 264): everyday soyne ‘go out’ is replaced in the elegant register by an elaborate circumlocution; everyday kamuy ‘god’ is replaced by kamuy ne manu p 'what is said to be a god'. In each case the substitute form encodes a relational or evaluative frame around the concept rather than naming it directly — a structural parallel to the fire-deity epithet alternation and, plausibly, to the bear-ceremony and hunting-taboo substitutions whose inventory remains undocumented in the consulted sources. For the broader system of elegant periphrasis and archaic morphology, see Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction); for the genre contexts in which these registers are activated, see Chapter 151 (The Sakehe Refrain, Verse Meter, and the Structure of Sung Verse).