Ainu language

Ainu (アイヌ イタㇰ, aynu itak), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu (Japanese: 北海道アイヌ語), is the native language 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 regarding its origin. Until the 20th century, the Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu, Kuril Ainu, and Sakhalin Ainu – were spoken throughout Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small communities in the Kuril Islands, up to the southern tip of Kamchatka.

As a result of the cultural genocide of the Ainu people carried out by Japan during the colonization of Hokkaido, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers declined steadily throughout the 20th century. By 2008, Hokkaido Ainu was critically endangered, with only two elderly people reported to speak it as their first language. In 2021, Ainu language scholar Hiroshi Nakagawa stated, 'There are no native speakers of Ainu left in Japan.'^[3]