Knowledge base · Part I — The Language and Its Setting · this topic as a network
6. The History of Ainu Language Description and Previous Research
How has the grammatical description of Ainu developed over time?
Ainu was not traditionally a written language (Bugaeva 2012: 462–463). In almost all previous descriptions of Ainu, references comparing similarities and differences with Japanese are widespread (Refsing 1986: 48).
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Edo-period records and the philological tradition
What words and phrases were recorded in the earliest Ainu documents?
The oldest extant recorded source on the Ainu language is the vocabulary Matsumae no koto - Ezo kotoba no koto from around 1600, which contains 117 words and short phrases compiled for merchants trading with the Ainu (Refsing 1986: 16). The earliest non-Japanese word list of Ainu was compiled in 1621 by Jeronymo de Angelis and contains 54 Ainu words, 36 of which are numerals (Refsing 1986: 16). The Japanese-Ainu dictionary Ezo hōgen moshiogusa, compiled in 1792 by Uehara Kumajirō and Abe Chōzaburō, contains nearly 3,000 words classified by meaning, alongside common phrases and short texts (Refsing 1986: 16). A distinct Honshu Tohoku dialect is generally not established in Ainu dialectology because the surviving evidence is limited to place names and some personal names, with no records of everyday vocabulary made before speakers disappeared (Nakagawa 2024: 87).
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Batchelor, Piłsudski, and early Western documentation
What evidence supports the classification of Ainu as a language isolate?
The 18th- and 19th-century Russian and Polish word lists compiled by Krasheninnikov, Steller, and Dybowski primarily contain vocabulary from Northern Kuril Ainu (Refsing 1986: 18). Dobrotworski's Ainsko-Russkij Slovar (1875) contains 10,930 entries, about half of which were collected in Sakhalin (Refsing 1986: 18). Bronisław Piłsudski published a collection of Sakhalin Ainu texts with translations in 1912 under the title Materials for the Study of Ainu Language and Folklore (Refsing 1986: 18). Batchelor (1938) lists i- as a third-person singular object form (reported in Shibatani 1990: 46). Until Kubodera's dictionary draft was published in 1991, Batchelor's dictionary was the only alphabetical Ainu-Japanese dictionary even for the most extensively described Saru dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 99). Despite researchers frequently visiting Shiraoi from early on, linguistic documentation of the Shiraoi dialect remains considerably limited (Nakagawa 2024: 98).
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Kindaichi and Chiri: the classical Japanese descriptive tradition
How has the study of oral literature influenced Ainu grammar analysis?
Chiri (1942) was the first to propose the now-established analyses that Ainu has no need to set up an adjective word class distinct from verbs and that property-concept/stative verbs also incorporate change into that state as part of their meaning (Nakagawa 2024: 627). Connected verbs were previously referred to as 'type-3 verbs' by Kindaichi and Chiri, 'separable verbs' by Sato (2008a), and 'connected transitive verbs' in the Saru dialect dictionary (Nakagawa 2024: 495). Chiri Mashio considered that all polysyllabic words in Ainu may be split up into mono- or bisyllabic morphemes or single phonemes carrying separate meanings (reported in Refsing 1986). The first comparative study of Ainu dialects was a 1960 lexico-statistical survey of nineteen dialects conducted by Shiro Hattori and Mashio Chiri using the Swadesh 200-word list (reported in Refsing 1986: 52).
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The modern descriptive era: Tamura, Refsing, Shibatani, and Satō
What dialectal differences exist among Ainu varieties?
Linguistic descriptive research on the Chitose dialect of Ainu began in the 1980s, eventually producing grammars and dictionaries second only to those of the Saru dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 96). Tamura interprets both a and nisa as tense markers in the Saru dialect (reported in Refsing 1986: 46). In Refsing's analysis of the Shizunai dialect, siri is interpreted as a nominalizer rather than as a marker of visual perception mood (Refsing 1986), and hawe is defined as a nominalizer rather than an auditive perception mood marker (Refsing 1986). A construction involving the case postposition ta and the existential verb oka expressing subjunctive or desiderative meaning is not found in the Shizunai dialect material (Refsing 1986). Murasaki (1967) classifies Ainu verbs into intransitive (V0), transitive (V1), and ditransitive (V2) (reported in Satō 2025), and accounts for the inflection of Ainu verbs and nouns by transformational rules of deletion, replacement, and movement (reported in Satō 2025).
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