Ainu languages

Ainu
Ethnicity:	Ainu, Emishi, other Jomon people
Geographic distribution:	Hokkaidō; formerly southern and central Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and perhaps northern Honshū
Linguistic classification:	One of the world's primary language families Austric languages
Subdivisions:	Hokkaidō Ainu Sakhalin Ainu Kuril Ainu Taraika Ainu
ISO 639-3:	ain
Glottolog:	ainu1252
Historically attested range of the Ainu (solid red) and suspected former range (pink) based on toponymic evidence (red dots) [Vovin 1993], Matagi villages (purple dots), and Japanese isoglosses

One of the world's primary language families

The Ainu languages are a small language family originally spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. They are alternately considered a group of closely related languages, or as divergent dialects of a single language isolate. The only surviving member is the Hokkaidō Ainu, which is considered critically endangered by UNESCO.

Shibatani (1990:9) and Piłsudski (1998:2) speak of "Ainu languages" when comparing the varieties of Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. However, Vovin (1993) speaks only of "dialects". Refsing (1986) says Hokkaidō and Sakhalin Ainu were not mutually intelligible. Hattori (1964) considered Ainu data from 19 regions of Hokkaido and Sakhalin, and found the primary division to lie between the two islands.

Scanty 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.

It is often reported that Ainu was the language of the indigenous Emishi people of the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. 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 (Miller 1967:239, Shibatani 1990:3, Vovien 2008). Other place names in Kantō and Chūbu, such as Mount Ashigara (Kanagawa–Shizuoka), Musashi (modern Tokyo), (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.