Tokyo, March 1. Specialists in the endangered language of the indigenous Ainu people of Japan have published the most comprehensive compendium of their language to date, which aims to enrich the field of linguistics and pique the interest of other scholars to invigorate their study.
“Handbook of the Ainu Language”, from the publishing house De Gruyter Mouton, covers about 700 pages the history of the study of this language, the obstacles and the problems during this one , and its characteristics.
Ainu is one of the so-called isolated languages, such as Basque from the Iberian Peninsula or Yagan from South America, a language with no genetic relationship to any known language, living or dead.
Linguistic research proper in Ainu began at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a widely documented language, with freely available online resources like a corpus of folklore or a conversation glossary from the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), but most existing dictionaries and grammars focus on a particular dialect. .
A WINDOW ON THE PAST
The Ainu language includes three groups of dialects, that of the island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan; that of the Russian island of Sajalin, to the north of the said Japanese island; and that of the Kuril Islands, northeast of Hokkaido, who died at the beginning of the last century.
The new manual “tries to cover all areas to some extent,” says linguist Anna Bugaeva, who edited the book, in an interview with EFE.
Settled in Japan for almost three decades, Bugaeva arrived in the country in 1996 to deepen her study of Japanese, which she began at the University of Saint Petersburg (Russia). Her interest in the origins of the majority language of the archipelago and its dialects led her to question its relationship with the Ainu language.
“In a way, after writing my dissertation, I had the impression that Ainu has no relation to Japanese, it’s very enigmatic in that sense”, explains the linguist.
There are about six thousand languages in the world and about two thousand language families, and also something more than a hundred languages that are not related to them, the isolated languages.
“It probably wasn’t always like this. They had parents, they just died and it’s the remnants of other languages that have died out, so (language isolates) can become a way to untangle the past” Bugaeva thinks. .
The Ainu language has very particular characteristics, explains the academic, including some very rare types of nominal incorporation. “If you read linguistics books they say, ‘It’s impossible to incorporate the subject of transitive verbs,’ but Ainu can do it to some extent. It’s quite rare, but not impossible.”
Bugaeva considers that by perpetuating the study of a linguistic “relic” such as this “it is possible to contribute to linguistic theory by discovering something particularly new” and thus “to enrich our knowledge of human language in general “.
A community in decline
This new textbook on the Ainu language has been written to be accessible to any linguist without prior knowledge, to establish a benchmark for academic citation, and with some hope of generating interest in its study.
Seventeen scholars participated in its design, the entire Ainu linguistic community, Bugaeva says, which is shrinking. The limited job opportunities are joined by the dying community of native speakers.
Even in the late 90s, there were barely a dozen speakers left. The fact that the language is an oral tradition already made it difficult to work with these people, who were already very old. Others today continue to hide their origins or simply ignore them.
The Ainu were subjected to repressive assimilation by the Japanese government from 1899. They were forced to turn their backs on their language and culture, their lands were expropriated and they were scattered throughout the country, in more to be discriminated against. .
It was not until 2019 that the Japanese parliament approved the first regulations expressly recognizing this community with a physiognomy similar to the Eskimo and its own traditions as indigenous.
In recent years, the Executive and Ainu associations have increased the promotion of culture and the study of languages, many of whose students are the community’s own descendants, seeking to reconcile with their origins.
This realization “is positive, but it comes quite late. I wish it had been like this in the 1980s or 1990s,” says Bugaeva, who hopes her textbook will help preserve the Ainu language.
Maria Rollan