Ainu languages

Data on Kuril Ainu is scarce, but it is thought to have been as divergent as Sakhalin and Hokkaidō.

In Sakhalin 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 modern Uglegorsk, is the best documented and has a dedicated grammatical description. Take Asai, the last speaker of Sakhalin Ainu, died in 1994.[5] The Sakhalin Ainu dialects had long vowels and a final -h phoneme, which they pronounced as /x/.

Hokkaidō Ainu clustered into several dialects with substantial differences between them: the 'neck' of the island (Oshima County, data from Oshamambe and Yakumo); the "classical" Ainu of central Hokkaidō around Sapporo and the southern coast (Iburi and Hidaka counties, data from Horobetsu, Biratori, Nukkibetsu and Niikappu; historical records from Ishikari County and Sapporo show that these were similar); Samani (on the southeastern cape in Hidaka, but perhaps closest to the northeastern dialect); the northeast (data from Obihiro, Kushiro and Bihoro); the north-central dialect (Kamikawa County, data from Asahikawa and Nayoro) and Sōya (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.

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 by Hattori.

John C. Street (1962) proposed linking Ainu, Korean, and Japanese in one family and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic in another, with the two families linked in a common "North Asiatic" family. Street's grouping was an extension of the Altaic 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 proposed Eurasiatic 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.[8][9][10][11]

Shafer (1965) presented evidence suggesting a distant connection with the Austroasiatic 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. In Vovin (1993), he still regarded this hypothesis as preliminary.

The Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with the Nivkhs 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 and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing.[12]

The Ainu came into extensive contact with the Japanese in 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.[13] There are also a great number of loanwords 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 as 'rakko' ("sea otter"; Ainu 'rakko'), 'tonakai' ("reindeer"; Ainu 'tunakkay'), and 'shishamo' (a fish, Spirinchus lanceolatus; Ainu 'susam'). 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 Japanese sake or shake, meaning "salmon", probably from the Ainu sak ipe or shak embe for "salmon", literally "summer food".

A small number of linguists suggested a relation between Ainu and Indo-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 did not follow the theory any more and concentrated on more local language families.[14][15]

Tambotsev (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.[16]

Attested historical extent of Ainu (red) and suspected earlier extent on Honshu (pink). The latter is based on toponymic evidence (red dots) and Matagi villages (purple dots). The western limit is defined by the early eastern limit of the Japanese language, as preserved in modern Japanese isoglosses.

It is occasionally suggested that Ainu was the language of the indigenous Emishi people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu.[lower-alpha 1] The main evidence for this is the presence of placenames 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 and Chūbu, such as the Kurobe and Oyabe rivers in Toyama Prefecture.[18] Other place names in Kantō and Chūbu, such as Mount Ashigara (Kanagawa–Shizuoka), Musashi (modern Tokyo), Keta Shrine (Toyama), and the Noto Peninsula, have no explanation in Japanese, but do in Ainu. The traditional matagi hunters of the mountain forests of Tōhoku retain Ainu words in their hunting vocabulary.[19][20]

However, more recent studies and evidence make this scenario unlikely. A study by Lee and Hasegawa from the Waseda University using linguistic, archeologic and genetic evidence, found that the Ainu are significantly linked to the Okhotsk culture. Lee and Hasegawa found that proto-Ainu expanded from northern Hokkaido to the Kurils, Kamchatka as well as northern Honshu. They further propose that the Ainu language, or its ancestral form "Proto-Ainu", comes from the Okhotsk culture and people of northern Hokkaido.[21] The Emishi are recently often suggested to have spoken a language unrelated to Ainu. A recent proposal found convincing evidence that the Emishi spoke a divergent Japonic language, most closely related to the historical Izumo dialect.[22]

The linguist and historian Joran Smale (2014) similarly found that the Ainu language likely originated from the Okhotsk people, which had strong cultural influence on the "Epi-Jōmon" of southern Hokkaido and northern Honshu, but that the Ainu people themselves formed from the combination of both ancient groups. Additionally, he notes that the historical distribution of Ainu dialects correspond to the distribution of the Okhotsk culture.[23]