Ainu language

Ainu
アイヌ・イタㇰ Aynu=itak
Multilingual sign in Japanese, Ainu, English, Korean and Chinese. Ainu is the second language from the top on the right side of the sign.
Pronunciation	[ˈainu iˈtak]
Native to	Japan
Region	Hokkaido
Ethnicity	15,000 Ainu people in Japan (no date)[1]
Native speakers	10 (2007)[2]
Language family	Language isolate
Writing system	Katakana, Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ain
Glottolog	hokk1243
ELP	Ainu (Japan)
The historically-attested range of the Ainu (solid red) and the suspected former range (pink) based on toponymic evidence (red dots) [Vovin 1993], Matagi villages (purple dots), and Japanese isoglosses
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The Ainu language is the language of the Ainu people in northern Japan.^[3] It was not written until the 19th century. Since then, it has been written in katakana or the Latin alphabet.

In the 19th century, Ainu was spoken in Ezo (including Hokkaidō Island and the southern part of Chishima Islands), the southern part of Karapto (Sakhalin) and the northern part of Chishima Islands (Kuril Islands).^[4] Now it is only spoken in Hokkaidō.

Ainu had many dialects, including Chitose, Saru, and Karapto.^[3] Now only the Hokkaidō dialect survives. The dialects were so different from one another that a speaker of one dialect could not understand a speaker of another dialect.^[3]

Historically, speakers of Ainu lived near speakers of Japanese and Itelmen (from Kamchatka). The Nivkh, which was spoken in the northern part of Sakhalin, is another isolated language.

1. ↑ Ainu language at Ethnologue (8th ed., 1974). Note: Data may come from an earlier edition.
2. ↑ D. Bradley, "Languages of Mainland South-East Asia," in O. Miyaoka, O. Sakiyama, and M. E. Krauss (eds), The vanishing languages of the Pacific Rim, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007), pp. 301–336. .
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1 3.2} Nakagawa 2013, pp. 8–11.
4. ↑ Cite error: The named reference GIA was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).