| Ainu | |
|---|---|
| Ainuic | |
| Geographic distribution | FormerlyHokkaido, southern and centralSakhalin, theKuril Islands, and possibly northernHonshu |
| Ethnicity | Ainu |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primarylanguage families |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 /5 | ain |
| ISO 639-3 | ain |
| Glottolog | ainu1252 |
 Map of the historical distribution of Ainu languages and dialects | |
TheAinu languages (/ˈaɪnuː/EYE-noo),[1] sometimes known asAinuic, were a smalllanguage family, often regarded as alanguage isolate, historically spoken by theAinu people of northernJapan and neighboring islands, up to the southern tip of theKamchatka Peninsula.
The primary varieties of Ainu are alternately considered a group of closely related languages[2] or divergentdialects of a single language isolate.Toponymic evidence suggests Ainu was once spoken in northernHonshu and that much of the historically attested extent of the family was due to a relatively recent expansion northward. No genealogical relationship between Ainu and any other language family has been demonstrated, despite numerous attempts.
Kuril Ainu was declaredextinct in 1962, and Sakhalin Ainu in 1994. According to the linguist Hiroshi Nakagawa, by 2021 no one in Japan had Ainu as their first language.[3]
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Recognition of the different varieties of Ainu spoken throughout northern Japan and its surrounding islands in academia varies.Shibatani (1990:9) andPiłsudski (1998:2) both speak of "Ainu languages" when comparing the varieties of language spoken inHokkaidō and Sakhalin; however,Vovin (1993) speaks only of "dialects". Refsing (1986) says Hokkaidō and Sakhalin Ainu were notmutually intelligible.Hattori (1964) considered Ainu data from 19 regions of Hokkaidō and Sakhalin, and found the primary division to lie between the two islands.
Hokkaidō Ainu clustered into several dialects with substantial differences between them: the 'neck' of the island (Oshima County, data fromOshamambe andYakumo); the "classical" Ainu of central Hokkaidō aroundSapporo and the southern coast (Iburi andHidaka counties, data fromHorobetsu,Biratori, Nukkibetsu andNiikappu; historical records fromIshikari County and Sapporo show that these were similar);Samani (on the southeastern cape inHidaka, but perhaps closest to the northeastern dialect); the northeast (data fromObihiro,Kushiro andBihoro); the north-central dialect (Kamikawa County, data fromAsahikawa andNayoro) andSōya (on the northwestern cape), which was closest of all Hokkaidō varieties to Sakhalin Ainu. Most texts and grammatical descriptions we have of Ainu cover the Central Hokkaidō dialect.
Data onKuril Ainu is scarce, but it is thought to have been as divergent as Sakhalin and Hokkaidō.
InSakhalin Ainu, an eastern coastal dialect of Taraika (near modern Gastello (Poronaysk)) was quite divergent from the other localities. The Raychishka dialect, on the western coast near modernUglegorsk, is the best documented and has a dedicated grammatical description.Tahkonanna, the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu, died in 1994.[4] The Sakhalin Ainu dialects had long vowels and a final -h phoneme, which was pronounced[x].
Scant data from Western voyages at the turn of the 19th–20th century (Tamura 2000) suggest there was also great diversity in northern Sakhalin, which was not sampled byHattori.
Vovin (1993) splits Ainu "dialects" as follows:[5]
Theproto-language was reconstructed twice byAlexander Vovin.[6][7]
| Labial | Dental/ Alveolar | Dorsal | Dorso-Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | *m | *n | ||
| Stop | *p | *t | *k | |
| Continuant | *w | *ð | *ɣ | *h |
| Sibilant | *s | |||
| Rhotic | *r |
| Bilabial | Dental/ Alveolar | Dorsal | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | *m | *n | |||
| Stop | voiceless | *p | *t | *k | (*q) |
| voiced | *d | *g | |||
| Fricative | voiceless | *s | *h | ||
| voiced | (*H) | ||||
| Sonorant | *ɾ | *j | |||
The second reconstruction shows the voiced stops except for [b] being distinct phonemes and uses⟨*q⟩ for the glottal stop.[Is this a doubtful reconstruction?] He also tentatively proposes that there might have been a third fricative alongside *s and *h, which was voiced, its place of articulation unknown. He represents it with⟨*H⟩.
Reconstructed Proto-Ainu numerals (1–10) and its reflexes in selected descendants are as follows:
| Proto-Ainu[a] | Hokkaido Ainu | Sakhalin Ainu | Kuril Ainu | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | *sì=nÉ= | sinep | sinep | shinep |
| 2 | *tuu= | tup[8] | tup | tup |
| 3 | *dE= | re | rep | nep |
| 4 | *íì=nÈ= | inep | inep | inep |
| 5 | *áskì | asiknep | asik | ashinep |
| 6 | *ii=hdan= | iwan | iwan | oshwamp |
| 7 | *a=d[E]=hdan= | arwan | arwam | arawamp |
| 8 | *tu=pE=hdan= | tupesanpe | tubis | tumisampe |
| 9 | *si=nE=pE=hdan= | sinepesanpe | sinspis | shinimesampe |
| 10 | *hdán= | wan | uupis | oampe |
Eight front and back vowels are reconstructed; three more central vowels are uncertain.
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | *i | (*ü) | (*ï) | *u |
| Close-Mid | *e | (*ë) | *o | |
| Open-Mid | *E | *O | ||
| Open | *a | *A | ||
Nogenealogical relationship between Ainu and any other language family has been demonstrated, despite numerous attempts. Thus, it is alanguage isolate. Ainu is sometimes grouped with thePaleosiberian languages, but this is only a geographic blanket term for several unrelated language families that were present in easternmost Siberia before the advances of Turkic and Tungusic languages there.
A study by Lee andHasegawa ofWaseda University found evidence that the Ainu language and the early Ainu-speakers originated from the Northeast Asian/Okhotsk population, which established themselves in northern Hokkaido and expanded into large parts ofHonshu and theKurils.[9]
The Ainu languages share a noteworthy amount of vocabulary (especially fish names) with several Northeast Asian languages, includingNivkh,Tungusic,Mongolic, andChukotko-Kamchatkan. While linguistic evidence points to an origin of these words among the Ainu languages, its spread and how these words arrived into other languages will possibly remain a mystery.[10]
The most frequent proposals for relatives of Ainu are given below:
John C. Street (1962) proposed linking Ainu,Korean, andJapanese in one family andTurkic,Mongolic, andTungusic in another, with the two families linked in a common "North Asiatic" family. Street's grouping was an extension of theAltaic hypothesis, which at the time linked Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, sometimes adding Korean; today Altaic sometimes includes Korean and rarely Japanese but not Ainu (Georg et al. 1999).
From a perspective more centered on Ainu, James Patrie (1982) adopted the same grouping, namely Ainu–Korean–Japanese and Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic, with these two families linked in a common family, as in Street's "North Asiatic".
Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) likewise classified Ainu with Korean and Japanese. He regarded "Korean–Japanese-Ainu" as forming a branch of his proposedEurasiatic language family. Greenberg did not hold Korean–Japanese–Ainu to have an especially close relationship with Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic within this family.
The Altaic hypothesis is now rejected by the scholarly mainstream.[11][12][13][14]
Shafer (1965) presented evidence suggesting a distant connection with theAustroasiatic languages, which include many of the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia.Vovin (1992) presented his reconstruction of Proto-Ainu with evidence, in the form of proposed sound changes and cognates, of a relationship with Austroasiatic. InVovin (1993), he still regarded this hypothesis as preliminary.
The Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with theNivkhs during the course of their history. It is not known to what extent this has affected the language. Linguists believe the vocabulary shared between Ainu andNivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due toborrowing.[15]
The Ainu came into extensive contact with the Japanese in the 14th century. Analytic grammatical constructions acquired or transformed in Ainu were probably due to contact with the Japanese language. A large number of Japanese loanwords were borrowed into Ainu and to a smaller extent vice versa.[16] There are also a great number ofloanwords from the Japanese language in various stages of its development to Hokkaidō Ainu, and a smaller number of loanwords from Ainu into Japanese, particularly animal names such asrakko (猟虎, 'sea otter'; Ainurakko),tonakai (馴鹿, 'reindeer'; Ainutunakkay), andshishamo (柳葉魚, a fish,Spirinchus lanceolatus; Ainususam). Due to the low status of Ainu in Japan, many ancient loanwords may be ignored or undetected, but there is evidence of an older substrate, where older Japanese words which have no clear etymology appear related to Ainu words which do. An example is modern Japanesesake orshake (鮭), meaning 'salmon', probably from the Ainusak ipe orshak embe for 'salmon', literally 'summer food'.
According to P. Elmer (2019), the Ainu languages are acontact language, i.e. have strong influences from various Japonic dialects/languages during different stages, suggesting early and intensive contact between them somewhere in theTōhoku region, with Ainu borrowing a large amount of vocabulary and typological characteristics from early Japonic.[17]
A small number of linguists suggested a relation between Ainu andIndo-European languages, based on racial theories regarding the origin of the Ainu people. The theory of an Indo-European—Ainu relation was popular until 1960; later linguists dismissed it and concentrated on more local language families.[18][19]
Tambovtsev (2008) proposes that Ainu is typologically most similar to Native American languages and suggests that further research is needed to establish a genetic relationship between these languages.[20]
Until the 20th century, Ainu languages were spoken throughout the southern half of the island ofSakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. Only the Hokkaido variant survives, with the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu having died in 1994.
Some linguists note that the Ainu language was an importantlingua franca on Sakhalin.Asahi (2005) reported that the status of the Ainu language was rather high and was also used by early Russian and Japanese administrative officials to communicate with each other and with the indigenous people.[21]
It is occasionally suggested that Ainu was the language of the indigenousEmishi people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu.[b] The main evidence for this is the presence ofplace names that appear to be of Ainu origin in both locations. For example, the-betsu common to many northern Japanese place names is known to derive from the Ainu word'pet' ("river") in Hokkaidō, and the same is suspected of similar names ending in-be in northern Honshū andChūbu, such as theKurobe andOyabe rivers inToyama Prefecture.[22] Other place names inKantō andChūbu, such asMount Ashigara (Kanagawa–Shizuoka),Musashi (modern Tokyo),Keta Shrine (Toyama), and theNoto Peninsula, have no explanation in Japanese, but do in Ainu. The traditionalmatagi hunters of the mountain forests ofTōhoku retain Ainu words in their hunting vocabulary (seeMatagi dialect).[23][24] However, Elmer (2019) has also suggested Japonic etymologies, which supposedly got borrowed into early Ainu and lost in contemporary Japonic dialects.[17]
The direction of influence and migration is debated. It has been proposed that at least some Jōmon period groups spoke a proto-Ainu language,[25] and that they displaced theOkhotsk culture north from southern Hokkaido when the Ainu fled Japanese expansion into northern Honshu, with the Okhotsk ancestral to the modernNivkh as well as a component of the modern Ainu. However, it has also been proposed that the Ainu themselves can be identified with the Okhotsk culture, and that they expanded south into northern Honshu as well as to theKamchatka Peninsula,[9][26] or that the Emishi spoke a Japonic language, most closely related to ancientIzumo dialect, rather than anything related to Ainu, with Ainu-speakers migrating later from Hokkaido to northern Tōhoku. The purported evidence for this are old-Japanese loanwords in the Ainu language, including basic vocabulary, as well as distinctive Japonic terms and toponyms found in Tōhoku and Hokkaido, that have been linked to the Izumo dialect.[27]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)In this paper, we reconstructed spatiotemporal evolution of 19 Ainu language varieties, and the results are in strong agreement with the hypothesis that a recent population expansion of the Okhotsk people played a critical role in shaping the Ainu people and their culture. Together with the recent archaeological, biological and cultural evidence, our phylogeographic reconstruction of the Ainu language strongly suggests that the conventional dual-structure model must be refined to explain these new bodies of evidence. The case of the Ainu language origin we report here also contributes additional detail to the global pattern of language evolution, and our language phylogeny might also provide a basis for making further inferences about the cultural dynamics of the Ainu speakers [44,45].
While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related.
When cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned, and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated.
Careful examination indicates that the established families, Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, form a linguistic area (called Altaic)...Sufficient criteria have not been given that would justify talking of a genetic relationship here.
...[T]his selection of features does not provide good evidence for common descent" and "we can observe convergence rather than divergence between Turkic and Mongolic languages—a pattern than is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent
Further analysis of the origins of Ainu language and the earliest places names of their settlements might provide some insight into the heritage of an Okhotsk language.
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| Chukotko-Kamchatkan |
| .svg) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yeniseian |
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| Yukaghir | ||||||
| Nivkh | ||||||
| Ainu | ||||||
| Eskaleut | ||||||
| Proposed groupings | ||||||
Italics indicateextinct languages | ||||||
