Chapter 49Personal, Reflexive, and Emphatic Pronouns

49.1 The independent pronouns and their place in the grammar

Hokkaido Ainu marks person obligatorily on the finite verb; the independent personal pronouns are additive elements, not the primary vehicle of argument tracking. Nakagawa assigns them arity 0 — they behave like adverbial adjuncts, are never obligatory, and cannot be incorporated into a verb stem, unlike other noun phrases of arity −1 Nakagawa (2024: 250, 262–263). Kindaichi and Chiri captured the same point by calling the pronoun a 贅語 'pleonasm', comparing kuani ku=eraman 'I know' to Latin ego scio and French moi je sais: the verbal index alone suffices, and the pronoun doubles it for emphasis Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 53). Tamura's Saru description confirms the pattern — pronouns function syntactically like adverbs, appearing only when a specific pragmatic condition is met Tamura (1971: 3–5). The practical result is that pronouns appear far less freely than in Japanese, and third-person forms are particularly rare: where Japanese uses 彼/彼女, Hokkaido Ainu overwhelmingly prefers demonstrative phrases (toan kur 'that person', nea menoko 'that woman') Nakagawa (2024: 250, 256).

The sole pronoun that is dialect-invariant across all of Hokkaido is 2SG eani. All other forms show at least some regional variation; the central division separates Saru and Chitose (1SG kani) from the rest of Hokkaido (1SG kuani), and the plural and fourth-person rows diverge considerably across zones Nakagawa (2024: 250–251). The verbal affixes these pronouns reduplicate are described in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms).

Reflexive marking in Hokkaido Ainu is realized verbally, not by dedicated reflexive pronouns. The prefixes yay- and si-, which redirect an action onto the subject or its possessor, are covered in Chapter 84 (The Reflexive yay-) and Chapter 85 (The Reflexive-Possessive si- and the yay-/si- Division). The emphatic 'I myself / you yourself' function that some languages express with a distinct intensive-pronoun series is realized in HA by the independent pronoun plus a focus or topic particle — the same pronouns described here, in their focus-hosting function.

49.2 Internal structure: the nominalised existential

The personal pronouns are not primitive forms. Tamura's foundational analysis derives each one by attaching a person index to one of two existential roots — singular an 'exist (SG)' or plural oka(y) 'exist (PL)' — and then nominalizing the result with the possessed (affiliative) form suffix, whose base is the formal noun hi ‘thing, fact (formal noun)’ Tamura (1971: 3–5); Nakagawa (2024: 253). The formula is: person-index + existential root + hi.

A diagnostic point secures this analysis. The plural pronouns use the transitive-subject / possessive person prefixes (ci=, a(n)=, eci=) rather than the intransitive-S suffixes (=as, =an) that a finite plural-existential verb would carry. This shows that the base is a noun oka(y)+hi 'the (plural) being', which is possessed, not a finite verb oka(y) that is person-inflected Nakagawa (2024: 253); Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 53).

The formal noun hi surfaces in the singular pronouns but is lost in the plurals. The singulars preserve it: ku=an-hi → kani (with contraction), e=an-hi → eani, an-hi → anihi. In the plural series the sequence okay-hi would produce an illicit syllable contact; hi is suppressed, and the final -y of okay further drops in Saru, yielding oka Nakagawa (2024: 253).

The 1SG contraction kuani → kani in Saru and Chitose follows the same vowel-deletion process as ciep → cep 'fish', where the high vowel of the prefix is absorbed by the adjacent syllable aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (gengojiro, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-02-05; asserted, corroborated by Nakagawa (2024: 250–251)). Elsewhere in Hokkaido the uncontracted form kuani is maintained.

49.3 The dialect paradigm

The full Hokkaido pronoun inventory spans six major dialect zones. The singular/plural distinction is maintained throughout, though the plural and fourth-person rows show the greatest variation Nakagawa (2024: 250–252, tables 60–65).

Corpus search returns kani at 522 tokens, eani at 716, and asinuma at 668; by contrast, the first-person exclusive plural coka reaches only 41 tokens ‹corpus-confirmed›. The disproportion between singular and plural frequencies matches Nakagawa's description of the plural forms as genuinely marginal Nakagawa (2024: 250). Clusivity in the first-person plural — exclusive ci=/=as versus the fourth-person inclusive — is treated in Chapter 64 (First-Person Plural and the Clusivity Question (ci=/=as, un=)).

49.4 Two further formation types

Beyond the existential-base type, two additional strategies contribute to the plural and third/fourth-person rows Nakagawa (2024: 254–255).

Type II — person-prefix + utari: Several dialects form plural pronouns with the associative-plural noun utar ‘relatives, kin group’ (possessed form utari): Tokachi ciutari (1PL), eciutari (2PL), anutari (4PL). These forms retain the lexical sense of utari 'kin, associates' and stand "halfway between a pronoun and a common noun" Nakagawa (2024: 254). The Saru/Chitose sequences k=utari, a=utari similarly mean 'my / their family' with a third-person (non-inclusive) verb, and only Tokachi anutari — which triggers a fourth-person (inclusive) verb — functions as a full plural pronoun 'we (including you)' Nakagawa (2024: 254).

Type III — sinuma base: The 3SG form sinuma and 4SG asinuma are built on a distinct base whose internal structure is unanalysed synchronically. Kindaichi posited a literary 2SG form esinuma by analogy, but Nakagawa found no attested example and treats it as a phantom form ‹speculative› Nakagawa (2024: 255).

49.5 Functions: emphasis, contrast, and focus hosting

Nakagawa identifies three conditions that trigger an independent pronoun where the verbal index alone would otherwise suffice Nakagawa (2024: 255–256). A neutral predication ('I am here', 'he came') carries no pronoun; a self-introduction such as *asinuma anak … a=ne 'I am —' would be almost never said without special emphasis Nakagawa (2024: 255).

49.6 The fourth-person pronoun and the singular/plural asymmetry

The fourth-person row is where the dialect paradigm shows its sharpest internal contradictions, providing, in Nakagawa's words, "an important hint for the historical origin of the fourth-person singular" that remains unresolved ‹contested› Nakagawa (2024: 251–252).

In Saru and Chitose both the pronoun and the verb distinguish singular from plural: pronoun asinuma (SG) vs aoka (PL), paralleled by distinct singular and plural verbal forms. Shizunai makes the opposite move: the pronoun preserves a singular/plural distinction (anani SG vs anoka PL), but the verb is invariably plural regardless of which pronoun is used — the pronoun-level contrast survives without a verbal counterpart. Horobetsu shows the mirror image: the verb retains a singular/plural opposition, but the only available fourth-person pronoun is the plural-base aokay, used even for a single narrator Nakagawa (2024: 252). These "opposite twists" are left as an open diachronic question by Nakagawa.

One community-proposed reconstruction treats the 4th-person prefix as a-/=an < *an-, with Shizunai anokay preserving the older form: the nasal-drop that produced Saru/western a= vs Tokachi/Ishikari an= would be blocked at pronoun level because the result would create hiatus aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (.k1270, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-03-22; ‹speculative›, attributed to Nakagawa). The connection between this prefix form and the broader morphological alignment of the fourth person is discussed in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms) and Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing).

In oral narrative, the fourth-person pronoun asinuma functions routinely as the first-person narrative self, alternating with or supplementing the verbal index ku=/k=. Corpus evidence places asinuma at 669 tokens, predominantly in Saru narrative texts. The fourth-person pronoun appears in this function with topic-focus particles — the same focus-hosting role described above:

The honorific and logophoric uses of the fourth person — including the use of a fourth-person verb for a single esteemed addressee — are treated in Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person). The full debate over terminology (fourth person, indefinite, inclusive) and the referential range of the a=/=an/i= affix set is carried in Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing).