Ainu is an almost extinct language isolate that is spoken by less than 100 native speakers on the island of Hokkaido in Northern Japan.
In the past it was spoken in a much wider area-the entire island of Hokkaido,in the southern part of the island of Sakhalin , the Kuril islands,some regions of Khabarovsk,the Kamchatkan peninsula and probably the northern part of the main Japanese island.
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| Ainu language |
It is written either in Japanese kanji, the Cyrillic script in Sakhalin or the Latin alphabet.
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| Ainu itak |
Ainu woman with mouth tattoo.
Nevertheless many Japanese, especially those of Ainu ancestry learn it as a second language and show great interest in it.
From the end of the 19th century until today, the language is constantly declining since the policy of Japan was the complete assimilation and integration of the Ainu people into the Japanese nation.
The Ainu were considered sub-human by Japanese with crack-pot theories that the Ainu look different because they are a cross-breed between humans and animals. Even the women were despised especially because of their face tattoos that looked like moustaches according to the Japanese.
Little girls had a single dot tatooed above their upper lip. As they grew they painted bigger and bigger tatoo around the entire mouth eventually. Hence the 'moustache'.
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| Ainu family and their house (Sakhalin,1904) |
Gradually all Ainu were resettled by Japanese authorities to northern territories and were seen as a buffer between Japan and Russia.
Mixed marriages between Ainu and the Japanese were very common which the Ainu themselves sought in order to avoid discrimination. Because of this full-blooded Ainu are rare today.
The Ainu were a semi-nomadic people who were mainly hunter-gatherers. Where conditions were favorable they kept small rice crops and others.
</ >Anthropologically the Ainu was a separate race from the Japanese with their main characteristics being the bigger, more open eyes, the thick beards and the white color of their skin.
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| Ainu hunters |
The Japanese called them hairy. Those who were younger and worked the fields outside had a tan.
But the older ones, who were helpless and were mostly sitting at home, had white skin like the western ones.
They are considered descendants of the Jōmon people, northern war tribes that the Japanese considered barbaric. The Jōmon people share characteristics with the Caucosoid race but are of different lineage.
The Ainu practiced animism and had some strange customs like the Iyomante- the custom of 'sending the bear away'. They would capture a newborn bear cub which would be ritually sacrificed after raising it for two years.
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| Ainu sacrifice bear. |
They would take shots at it with bows and arrows until it was dead.Then its meat would be distributed among the members of the tribe. Iyomante literally means to send away.
In the nineteenth century John Batchelor ,a British emmissary of the Anglican church in Japan studied the Ainu language and published many works in it including the New Testament , dictionaries, grammars, works on the Ainu culture and others. Batchelor was very critical on how the Japanese treated the Ainu.
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| John Batchelor |
Ainu is an isolated language that does not seem to be related to any other. Attempts have been made to link it to Japanese, Siberian and Alaskan languages but to no avail.
Some Ainu phrases.
Ainu- man
Ainu itak - Ainu language
Irankarapte -hello
