| Also Known As: Ainu Itak,Ainu
Description:
Ainu (Ainu: アイヌ イタク, aynu itak; Japanese: アイヌ語 ainu-go; Cyrillic alphabet: Айну итак) is an Ainu language spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō.
Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. All but the Hokkaidō language are extinct, with the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu having died in 1994, and Hokkaidō Ainu is moribund, though there are ongoing attempts to revive it.
Ainu has no generally accepted genealogical relationship to any other language family. For the most frequent proposals, see Ainu languages.
Ainu is a moribund language, and has been endangered for at least the past few decades. Most of the 150,000 ethnic Ainu in Japan speak only Japanese. In the town of Nibutani (part of Biratori, Hokkaidō) where many of the remaining native speakers live, there are 100 speakers, out of which only 15 used the language every day in the late 1980s. The number of speakers today (by whatever definition one may use) is not known with any certainty. In all of Hokkaidō, it is estimated that there are perhaps 1,000 native..... full article at Wikipedia |
