Knowledge base · Part I — The Language and Its Setting · this topic as a network
4. The Sociolinguistic Situation: Endangerment and Revitalization
What is the current state of the language in terms of speakers, documentation, and revitalization?
The Ainu language is referred to by the word Aynuitak (reported in Ōno 2022: 12.4). The word yayyukar is explained in Ainu as meaning 'to act on one's own' (reported in Ōno 2022: 12.5).
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Historical setting and language shift
How has the historical setting affected language shift?
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, an unofficial but effective ban prevented the Ainu from learning to speak or read Japanese (reported in Refsing 1986: 59). By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Russians on the Kurile Islands taught Russian to the native population and converted them to the Russian Orthodox faith (Refsing 1986: 59). Under direct Japanese central government rule between 1799 and 1821, officials in Ezo were ordered to use Japanese with the Ainu and encourage them to learn the language (Refsing 1986: 59). Monolingualism in Ainu was common historically on Hokkaido, with several hundred monolinguals still surviving until the early twentieth century (reported in Janhunen 2022: 2.4). Kuril Aleuts relocated to the Kuril Islands were able to speak the Kuril Ainu language (reported in Majewicz 2022: 4.4). The language shift of Ainu began around 1800 with bilingualism dominated by Ainu, shifted to Japanese dominance between approximately 1900 and 1940, and reached predominant Japanese monolingualism after 1940 (Refsing 1986). The Japanese state required the Ainu to learn Japanese in education and pressured them to refrain from using the Ainu language (reported in Ōno 2022: 12.2). As a result of Japanese-language compulsory education and social pressure to assimilate, the Ainu language and traditional lifestyles almost completely disappeared within a couple of generations (Refsing 1986: 61). By the second half of the twentieth century, the Ainu language was no longer being used in many households (Ōno 2022: 12.2). There is no longer any opportunity to speak Ainu or recount Ainu oral literature in daily life due to modernization and assimilation pressure using the Japanese language (Endō 2022: 10.5). The Kuril variety of Ainu disappeared in the beginning of the twentieth century (Bugaeva 2022: 20.6).
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The speaker situation
What is the current speaker situation and how is it measured?
Assuming that a language is dead when its transgenerational transmission ceases, Ainu should be treated as a dead language (Majewicz 2022: 4.2). There are likely no longer any speakers who have lived exclusively using Ainu or who speak Ainu more fluently than Japanese (Nakagawa 2024: 13). The number of fluent speakers of Ainu remains small, and the number of people who speak Ainu as a mother tongue has not increased despite language classes being held in many places for many years (Ōno 2022: 12.4). For dialects such as Yakumo, Nayoro, Bihoro, and Sōya, few materials other than Hattori (1964) have been published, and fluent speakers are no longer known (Nakagawa 2024: 100). The majority of surviving Ainu speakers at the time of fieldwork were women (Refsing 1986: 65). Sute Orita was not the last speaker of the Shizunai dialect; at least one other woman from the area and Mr. Kuzuno were also able to speak it (Refsing 1986: 65).
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Orthographic conventions
What writing systems are used and what are their features?
The Ainu language originally lacked an indigenous writing system (Ōno 2022: 12.3, Refsing 1986: 61).
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Lexical modernization and neologisms
How does the language create new words for modern concepts?