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{{Infobox Language

Ainu (Ainu: ain アイヌ イタク, ''aynu itak''; Japanese: ja アイヌ語 ''ainu-go''; Cyrillic alphabet: Аину 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.

Speakers

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 speakers, almost all older than 30.date=February 2007 Among Ainu speakers (broadly defined), second-language learners presently outnumber native ones.

However, use of the language is on the rise. There is currently an active movement to revitalize the language — mainly in Hokkaidō but also elsewhere — to reverse the centuries-long decline in the number of speakers. This has led to an increasing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaidō, in large part due to the pioneering efforts of the late Ainu folklorist, activist and former Diet member Shigeru Kayano, himself a native speaker.

Phonology

Ainu syllables are CV(C) (that is, they have an obligatory syllable onset and an optional syllable coda) and there are few consonant clusters.

There are five vowels:

Consonants:

The glottal stop /ʔ/ only occurs at the beginning of words, before an accented vowel. The sequence /ti/ is realized as [t​͡ʃi], and /s/ becomes [ʃ] before /i/ and at the end of syllables. The affricate /ts/ has voiced and post-alveolar variants. There is some variation among dialects; in the Sakhalin dialect, syllable-final /p, t, k, r/ lenited and merged into /x/. After an /i/, this /x/ is pronounced [ç].

There is a pitch accent system. The accentuation of specific words varies somewhat from dialect to dialect. Generally, words including affixes have a high pitch on the stem, or on the first syllable if it is closed or has a diphthong, while other words have the high pitch on the second syllable, although there are exceptions to this generalization.

Typology and grammar

Ainu is SOV, with postpositions. Subject and object are usually marked with postpositions. Nouns can cluster to modify one another; the head comes at the end. Verbs, which are inherently either transitive or intransitive, accept various derivational affixes.

Typologically, Ainu is similar in word order (and some aspects of phonology) to Japanese and Korean, while its high degree of synthesis is more reminiscent of languages to its north and east.

Ainu traditionally featured incorporation of nouns and adverbs; this is rare in the modern colloquial language.

Applicatives may be used in Ainu to place nouns in the dative, instrumental, comitative, locative, allative, or ablative roles. Besides freestanding nouns, these roles may be assigned to incorporated nouns, and such use of applicatives is in fact mandatory for incorporating oblique nouns. Like incorporation, applicatives have grown less common in the modern language.

Ainu has a closed class of plural verbs, and some of these are suppletive.

Writing

Officially, the Ainu language is written in a modified version of the Japanese katakana syllabary. There is also a Latin-based alphabet in use. The ''Ainu Times'' publishes in both. In the Latin orthography, /ts/ is spelt ''c'' and /j/ as ''y''; /ʔ/, which only occurs initially before accented vowels, is not written. Other phonemes use the same character as the IPA transcription given above. An equals sign (=) is used to mark morpheme boundaries, such as after a prefix. Its pitch accent is denoted by acute accent in Latin (e.g. ''á''). This is usually not denoted in katakana.

Special katakana for the Ainu language

A Unicode standard exists for a set of extended katakana (Katakana Phonetic Extensions) for transliterating the Ainu language and other languages written with katakana. , These characters are used to write final consonants and sounds that cannot be expressed using conventional katakana. The extended katakana are based on regular katakana and either are smaller in size or feature a handakuten. As few fonts yet support these extensions, workarounds exist for many of the characters, such as the small katakana ain ク ''ku'' used as in ain アイヌイタク (''Aynu itak'').

This is a list of special katakana used in transcribing the Ainu language. Most of the characters are of the extended set of katakana, though a few have been used historically in Japanesedate=April 2009, and thus are part of the main set of katakana. A number of previously proposed characters have not been added to Unicode as they can be represented as a sequence of two existing codepoints.

Basic syllables

Diphthongs

Final [ɪ] is spelt ''y'' in Latin, small ィ in katakana. Final [ʊ] is spelt ''w'' in Latin, small ゥ in katakana. [ae] is spelt ''ae'', アエ, or アェ.

Example with initial ''k'':

Since the above rule is used systematically, some katakana combinations have different sounds from conventional Japanese.

Long vowels

There are long vowels in Sakhalin dialect. Either circumflex or macron is used in Latin, long vowel sign (ー) is used in katakana.

Example with initial ''k'':

Oral literature

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of hero-sagas called Yukar, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms.