Ainu language
| Hokkaido Ainu | |
|---|---|
| アイヌ イタㇰ aynu itak | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈainu iˈtak] |
| Native to | Japan |
| Region | Hokkaido |
| Ethnicity | 25,000 (1986) to ca. 200,000 (no date) Ainu people |
| Extinct | Went extinct between 2008 and 2017 (as a native language). Survives as a heritage language by a "few semispeakers". |
Ainu
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | ain |
| ISO 639-3 | ain |
| Glottolog | ainu1240 |
| ELP | Ainu (Japan) |
Ainu (アイヌ イタㇰ, aynu itak), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu (Japanese: 北海道アイヌ語), was the native language of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, considered to be 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.
Following the colonization of Hokkaido, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers declined steadily throughout the 20th century, eventually becoming critically endangered. By 2008, only two native speakers of Ainu remained, both elderly. By 2021, there were no native speakers, though native semispeakers remained. Languages with no native speakers left are considered extinct; under such definition, Ainu would have gone extinct sometime between 2008 and 2017.
The term Ainu comes from the endonym of the Ainu people, アイヌ (aynu), meaning 'person' or 'human'.