Ainu languages

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Ainu
Ainuic
Geographic
distribution		Currently only
language families
Subdivisions
ISO 639-2 / 5ain
ISO 639-3ain
Glottologainu1252
ELPAinu (Japan)
Map of the historical distribution of Ainu languages and dialects

The Ainu languages (/ˈaɪnuː/ EYE-noo),[1] sometimes known as Ainuic, are a small language family, often regarded as a language isolate, historically spoken by the Ainu people of northern Japan and neighboring islands.

The primary varieties of Ainu are alternately considered a group of closely related languages[2] or divergent dialects of a single language isolate. The only surviving variety is Hokkaido Ainu, which UNESCO lists as critically endangered. Sakhalin Ainu and Kuril Ainu are now extinct. Toponymic evidence suggests Ainu was once spoken in northern Honshu 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.

Varieties

Recognition of the different varieties of Ainu spoken throughout northern Japan and its surrounding islands in academia varies. Shibatani (1990:9) and

mutually 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

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.

Kuril Ainu

Data on

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

Sakhalin Ainu

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.[3] 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 by Hattori.

Classification

Vovin (1993) splits Ainu "dialects" as follows:[4]

Proto-language

The proto-language was reconstructed twice by Alexander Vovin.[5] [6]

Consonants (Vovin 1989)
Labial Dental/
Alveolar 		Dorsal Dorso-Glottal
Nasal *m *n
Stop *p *t *k
Continuant *w *ð *ɣ *h
Sibilant *s
Rhotic *r
Consonants (Vovin 1993)
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⟩.

Numerals
Proto-Ainu Hokkaido Ainu Sakhalin Ainu Kuril Ainu
1 *sì=nÉ= sinep
2 *tuu= tup[7]
3 *dE= re
4 *íì=nÈ= inep
5 *áskì asiknep
6 *ii=hdan= iwan
7 *a=d[E]=hdan= arwan
8 *tu=pE=hdan= tupesanpe
9 *si=nE=pE=hdan= sinepesanpe
10 *hdán= wan

Reconstructed Proto-Ainu numerals (1-10) and its reflexes in selected descendants are as follows:

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close *i (*ü) (*ï) *u
Close-Mid *e (*ë) *o
Open-Mid *E *O
Open *a *A

Eight front and back vowels are reconstructed; three more central vowels are uncertain.

External relationships

No

Paleosiberian 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 and Hasegawa of

Kurils.[8]

The Ainu languages share a noteworthy amount of vocabulary (especially fish names) with several Northeast Asian languages, including Nivkh, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Chukotko-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.[9]

The most frequent proposals for relatives of Ainu are given below:

Altaic

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.[10][11][12][13]

Austroasiatic

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.

Language contact with the Nivkhs

The Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with the

Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing.[14]

Language contact with the Japanese

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.[15] 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'.

According to P. Elmer (2019), the Ainu languages are a

contact language, i.e. have strong influences from various Japonic dialects/languages during different stages, suggesting early and intensive contact between them somewhere in the Tōhoku region, with Ainu borrowing a large amount of vocabulary and typological characteristics from early Japonic.[16]

Other proposals

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 concentrated on more local language families.[17][18]

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.[19]

Geography

Until the 20th century, Ainu languages were spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin 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 important lingua 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.[20]

Ainu on mainland Japan

A map of Japan and its northernmost territories, colour-coded to display the proposed historical extent of the Ainu language.
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

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.[22][23] However, Elmer (2019) has also suggested Japonic etymologies, which supposedly got borrowed into early Ainu and lost in contemporary Japonic dialects.[16]

The direction of influence and migration is debated. It has been proposed that at least some Jōmon period groups spoke a proto-Ainu language,

Izumo 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.[26]

Notes

  1. ^ Ainu may also have been the language of one of the peoples known as 'Emishi'; it is not known that the Emishi were a single ethnicity.

References

  1. ^ Bauer, Laurie (2007). The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forke, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2020). "Ainu". Glottolog 4.3.
  3. ISBN 9783110176148
    . Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  4. ^ Vovin 1993, p. 157.
  5. ^ Vovin 1993, pp. 77–154.
  6. ISSN 0176-4225
    .
  7. ^ Patrie (1982), p. 116.
  8. ^
    PMID 23638014
    . 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].
  9. ^ Alonso de la Fuente, Jose. "Hokkaidō "Ainu susam" and Japanese "shishamo"".
  10. ^ Campbell, Lyle; Mixco, Mauricio J. (2007). A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. University of Utah Press. p. 7. 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.
  11. ISBN 978-0226580579
    . When cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned, and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated.
  12. ISBN 978-0521626545
    . 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.
  13. ISBN 978-0521175777
    . ...[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
  14. ^ Vovin, Alexander (2016). "On the Linguistic Prehistory of Hokkaidō". Crosslinguistics and linguistic crossings in Northeast Asia: papers on the languages of Sakhalin and adjacent regions. Studia Orientalia. Vol. 117.
  15. ISBN 9781136446580. Retrieved 29 March 2019 – via Google Books
    .
  16. ^ a b Elmer, P. (2019). "Origins of the Japanese languages. A multidisciplinary approach" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 23 February 2020.
  17. ISBN 9789004300439
    .
  18. ^ Refsing, Kirsten (ed.). "Origins of the Ainu language : the Ainu Indo-European controversy". 新潟大学OPAC. Retrieved 17 September 2019.
  19. ^ Tambovtsev, Yuri (2008). "The phono-typological distances between Ainu and the other world languages as a clue for closeness of languages" (PDF). Asian and African Studies. 17 (1): 40–62. Retrieved 30 September 2019.
  20. ^ Yamada, Yoshiko (2010). A Preliminary Study of Language Contact around Uilta in Sakhalin. Hokkaido University.
  21. ^ Miller (1967), p. 239; Shibatani (1990), p. 3; Vovin (2008)
  22. ^ Masaki, Kudō (1989). Jōsaku to emishi. Kōkogaku Library. Science Press. p. 134.
  23. ^ Tanigawa, Ken'ichi (1980). Collected works. Vol. 1. pp. 324–325.
  24. S2CID 162188849
    .
  25. ^ Smale, Joran (June 2014). A Peer Polity Interaction approach to the interaction, exchange and decline of a Northeast-Asian maritime culture on Hokkaido, Japan. Leiden: Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology. 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.
  26. PMID 37588377
    .

Bibliography
Proposed classifications

Further reading

See also

External links

Wiktionary has a list of reconstructed forms at Appendix:Proto-Ainu reconstructions
Ainu languages test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Ainu phrasebook.
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