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Concept
Ainu language
Summary
Ainu (アイヌ・イタㇰ, Ainu-itak), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate with no academic consensus of origin. It is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Until the 20th century, the Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu and the now-extinct Kuril Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu – were spoken throughout Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. Due to the colonization policy employed by the Japanese government, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers decreased through the 20th century, and it is now moribund. A very low number of elderly people still speak the language fluently, though attempts are being made to revive it.
According to UNESCO, Ainu is an endangered language, with few native speakers amongst the country's approximately 30,000 Ainu people, a number that may be higher due to a potentially low rate of self-identification as Ainu within the country's ethnic Ainu population. Knowledge of the language, which has been endangered since before the 1960s, has declined steadily since; , just 304 people within Japan were reported to understand the Ainu language to some extent. , Ethnologue has listed Ainu as class 8b, "nearly extinct".
A survey of the Ainu people's life was done by the Hokkaido government in 2017, and about 671 people participated in it. The participants were those who were believed to be descendants of Ainu or who joined Ainu families by marriage or adoption. The topic of the survey included the Ainu language, and in regard to fluency, 0.7% of participants answered that they would "be able to have a conversation" in the Ainu language, 3.4% answered that they would "be able to have a conversation a little," 44.6% answered they would "not be able to have a conversation but have a little knowledge of the Ainu language," and 48.
Official source
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