The Ainu Language

There is no doubt that the rise of certain ‘power’ languages such as Mandarin and Japanese have become more popular and desirable to learn. This has led to other languages being ignored in return. There are many minority languages in Japan however almost none of them have received official recognition from the government and many of them are close to extinction. On the contrary, the dominance of the Japanese language is unrivalled in terms of number of native speakers and foreign language learners in Japan. However, this does not mean that other languages are pushed aside in favour of one superior, national language. The Ainu are an ethnic minority in Japan and the Ainu language is considered close to extinct nowadays, it is important therefore,

They originate from the Hokkaido island, which is one of the 4 main islands of modern Japan, north of Honshu (Shibatani, 1990). Supposedly, they are descendants of the Jomon people, however there are also influences from the Siberian hunter-gatherers, the Okhotsk due to migration (Lee S, 2013). Therefore, the group has not only East Asian but also Russian ancestry. In the 15th Century, the Japanese people had already settled in on the Oshima peninsula, south of Hokkaido and they came into contact with the Ainu people through the first of a major series of battles. (Shibatani, 1990). Between the late 18th Century and the early 19th Century was the first instance of threat towards the Ainu culture, caused by Japanese and Russian expansion. Under the Japanese central government, the Ainu were seen as Japanese rather than recognised as a community with a culture and language of their own. The situation worsened after the Meiji Restoration and by the end of the 19th century, no Ainu community remained beyond the purview of Japan and Russia. The use of Japanese and Russian languages among the ethnic Ainu increased, and Ainu language use declined (DeChicchis, 1995). The Ainu language could no longer function as the primary means of communication amongst the community. Today, Southern Hokkaido is the last autochthonous location of a few native speakers of

Nearly all of Japan’s 128 million people speak and write Japanese (Gottlieb, 2008), and in the past, Japan has been a mainly homogenous society. This suggests that the recognition of a national language has always been unnecessary. However, after the colonization commission of Hokkaido (Shibatani, 1990), the Japanese heavily enforced use of the Japanese language; given that Hokkaido had effectively become a Japanese island. Language policy in Japan is piecemeal in the sense that there is no overarching document which takes into consideration the national language, minority or community languages such as Ainu and the nature of strategically important foreign language learning within the same policy framework (Gottlieb, 2008). This indicates that the reason for the lack of measures implemented for Ainu language protection is because there was no initial legal framework which identified the Ainu as a separate indigenous and ethnic community. Furthermore, the Japanese government does not collect data on language use by its citizens. Census forms contain no question on ethnicity and listed under the category of ‘Japanese’ are the Ainu population. (Gottlieb, 2008) The existing Ainu population are therefore seen as Japanese citizens. Since the 19th Century, the