Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessEndangered language fact

Ainu, the language of the indigenous Ainu people of northern Japan, is critically endangered, with very few native speakers left. Community classes, teacher training, family programmes and museum courses are now creating new places where it is spoken.

Ainu language

LanguageCulture

The story behind the card

The Ainu live mainly on Hokkaido and once also lived on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, now part of Russia. After Japan formally took over Hokkaido in 1869, assimilation policies and discrimination pushed families to raise their children in Japanese. Ainu has no known relatives among the world's languages. From 1983 the Ainu activist Shigeru Kayano ran Ainu classes in his village of Nibutani, and in 1994 he became the first Ainu member of Japan's parliament, where he spoke in Ainu. Parliament recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people in 2008, a 2019 law promoted their culture, and the national Ainu museum, Upopoy, opened in 2020.

Türkçe oku
Kuzey Japonya'nın yerli halkı Aynuların dili Aynuca, anadili olarak konuşan pek az kişi kaldığı için yok olma tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya. Topluluk kursları, eğitmen yetiştirme, aile programları ve müze dersleri, dilin yeniden konuşulacağı ortamlar yaratıyor.

Aynular bugün çoğunlukla Hokkaido'da yaşar; bir zamanlar bugün Rusya'ya ait olan Sahalin'de ve Kuril Adaları'nda da yaşıyorlardı. Japonya 1869'da Hokkaido'yu resmen topraklarına katınca asimilasyon politikaları ve ayrımcılık, aileleri çocuklarını Japonca konuşarak büyütmeye itti. Aynucanın bilinen hiçbir dille akrabalığı yoktur. Aynu aktivist Shigeru Kayano 1983'ten itibaren köyü Nibutani'de Aynuca dersleri verdi; 1994'te Japon parlamentosuna giren ilk Aynu oldu ve mecliste Aynuca konuştu. Parlamento Aynuları 2008'de yerli halk olarak tanıdı, 2019'da Aynu kültürünü destekleyen bir yasa çıkarıldı, 2020'de de ulusal Aynu müzesi Upopoy açıldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Ainu language
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveLanguage

Neo-Tifinagh is a modern alphabet for the Amazigh (Berber) languages of North Africa, developed from the ancient Tifinagh letters. Today it is used in schools, on public signs and online.

The Amazigh peoples, often called Berbers, are the indigenous peoples of North Africa. Their script descends from an ancient alphabet known as Libyco-Berber, found on rock carvings and inscriptions more than two thousand years old, and the Tuareg of the Sahara kept a form of it, Tifinagh, in everyday use. From the late 1960s, activists, notably the Berber Academy in Paris, adapted these letters into Neo-Tifinagh. In 2003 Morocco's Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture adopted it for teaching Tamazight in schools, and the language became official in Morocco's constitution in 2011. Unicode added Tifinagh in 2005, so it can be typed on computers and phones.

TifinaghRead card
DriveLanguage

Hawaiian, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, came close to disappearing in the twentieth century. Families revived it by opening Hawaiian-language preschools in 1984 and winning Hawaiian-medium classes in public schools in 1987, a path that now runs from early childhood to university.

In 1896, three years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a law made English the language of instruction in schools, and speaking Hawaiian in class was soon discouraged, sometimes punished. By the early 1980s, by the organisers' estimate, fewer than fifty children could speak it. Parents and teachers founded the Pūnana Leo ('nest of voices') preschools, where only Hawaiian is spoken, then campaigned for classes in state schools where children learn every subject, from mathematics to science, in Hawaiian. The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has run a doctoral programme in Hawaiian and Indigenous language and culture revitalisation since 2006, the first of its kind.

Hawaiian languageRead card
WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

Bantu migrationsRead card
WonderMigration

Starting from Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago, seafarers speaking languages of the Austronesian family settled the islands of South-East Asia and much of the Pacific, as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and to the west reached Madagascar.

Most linguists, archaeologists and geneticists agree that the expansion started in Taiwan and reached the Philippines by around 2000 BC, though the newcomers mixed extensively with people already living in the islands. Sailing outrigger canoes, boats steadied by a float on one side, they carried taro, yams, pigs, dogs and chickens. From about 3,300 years ago a distinctive stamped pottery called Lapita marks their spread into the western Pacific. Navigating by stars, ocean swells and birds, Polynesian voyagers later reached Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, around AD 1250 to 1300. About 1,500 years ago others crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is why Malagasy is most closely related to a language of Borneo.

Austronesian expansionRead card
StillnessMusic

Fado is a Lisbon song tradition that took shape in the early nineteenth century in the city's old working-class districts near the port, such as Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto. Its name probably comes from the Latin fatum, fate. A solo singer is usually accompanied by a classical guitar and the twelve-string Portuguese guitar.

It was first sung among sailors, dock workers and the poor of the port districts. UNESCO describes fado as a blend of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local song and dance, rural traditions brought to Lisbon by migrants, and the city songs of the early nineteenth century. Its lyrics range over love, loss, fate and everyday city life. Saudade, a hard-to-translate longing for someone, somewhere or some time that is gone, runs through much of it, though not every song. Fado is still sung in concert halls, small fado houses and neighbourhood associations, and joined UNESCO's list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2011.

FadoRead card
Next card in the archiveKaurna, the Aboriginal language of the Adelaide Plains in South Australia, lost its last known native speaker in 1929. Since 1989, Kaurna people and linguists have been reviving it from community memory and nineteenth-century records, and it is now taught and used in public life.Read next →