Knowledge base · Part I — The Language and Its Setting · this topic as a network
3. The Ainu People, Their Homeland, and History
Who are the Ainu, what is their homeland, and how has their history shaped their present situation?
The Ainu homeland and its historical range
What was the historical extent of the Ainu homeland, and which territories did it cover?
The regions where Ainu was definitely spoken in the past are all of Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (Nakagawa 2024: 77). More broadly, the Ainu formerly inhabited Hokkaido, northern Honshu, southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and southern Kamchatka (Bugaeva 2022: 1.1), and Ainu is thought to have been spoken anciently at least in the northern part of the Tohoku region on Honshu (Nakagawa 2024: 13). In modern times, the Ainu people were settled in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (Ōno 2022: 12.2). Nakagawa proposes that a small number of people may have migrated and spoken Ainu at the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the Amur River basin (proposed in Nakagawa 2024: 13). There is, however, no historical record or evidence of an enduring Ainu-speaking community on the Asian continent (Nakagawa 2024: 88, Shiraishi & Tangiku 2022: 7.2).
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The archaeological background: from Jōmon to the historical Ainu
What archaeological cultures are linked to the Ainu's ancestry, and what does this imply for their language?
Ainu is held to be the sole surviving language of the original linguistic diversity of Jōmon Japan (Janhunen 2022: 2.4, 2.5). Janhunen asserts that Proto-Ainu was not originally native to Hokkaido but relocated there from Honshu in connection with the expansion of the Satsumon culture (Janhunen 2022: 2.4, 2.5), and that Proto-Ainu, which he terms Proto-Kurilic, was spoken on Hokkaido during the period of the Satsumon culture, approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago (Janhunen 2022: 2.4). The Ainu linguistic lineage has absorbed elements from Japanese, the language or languages of the Okhotsk people, and contact languages of Jōmon and Epi-Jōmon populations on Honshu and Hokkaido (Janhunen 2022: 2.4), and the Okhotsk culture population itself underwent language shift to Ainu (Janhunen 2022: 2.4).
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Meiji-era annexation and assimilation policies
How did Meiji-era annexation and colonization affect the Ainu population and their dominance in Hokkaido?
Family names were not used in Ainu society before 1868, when Japanese family names were adopted (Refsing 1986).
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