Ainu nearly vanished because Japan’s government pushed its speakers into Japanese, and only a handful of native speakers remain. Unesco lists it as “Critically Endangered”. Yet more Ainu people are relearning it, helped by laws, free classes, radio, and now speech recognition software.
The fall was fast. In 1870, a year after Ezo, now Hokkaido, became part of Japan, records suggest about 15,000 people spoke varieties of Ainu, most of them no other language. By 1917 the estimate was 350.
How a language was pushed aside
From 1868 the government imposed a new way of life on the Hokkaido Ainu, including bans on hunting and fishing. Kaori Tahara, a historian of Ainu origin writing in the UNESCO Courier, says the authorities never officially set out to eradicate the language. They built separate schools where Ainu children were taught Japanese, and that did the work. The BBC reports that Ainu was banned in schools.
Displacement finished off whole dialects. After the 1875 treaty between Japan and Russia, most Ainu from southern Sakhalin were moved to Hokkaido, where epidemics cut down the population. Stalin’s government expelled the Sakhalin Ainu again in 1945, and their dialect faded as those exiles died without passing it on.
Nobody knows exactly how many speakers remain. A 2006 Hokkaido government survey counted 304 who knew the language among 23,782 Ainu. Tahara warns the answers are subjective, and that many Ainu hide their identity rather than take part.
What has changed since the 1990s
A 1997 law to protect and promote Ainu culture replaced an assimilation law dating from 1899, and it made language teaching easier. The foundation it created trains Ainu language teachers, seven students a year. The Hokkaido Ainu association runs free courses in 14 areas of Hokkaido.
The state’s stance shifted further. Japan declared the Ainu an Indigenous people in 2008, according to the Asia-Pacific Journal. In 2019 a law gave that recognition legal force, with measures to make the Ainu more visible.
Radio has carried the language for decades. A private Sapporo station has broadcast a weekly Ainu class since the 1980s. In 2001 Shigeru Kayano, the first Ainu member of Japan’s parliament, paid to set up FM Pipaushi, which airs a show in Ainu twice a month.
Where AI comes in
The newest tool works from old tapes. Tatsuya Kawahara, an informatics professor at Kyoto University, leads a project that uses AI speech recognition on recorded oral stories, and says it now has 300 to 400 hours of data.
Some of the revival happens at home. Maya Sekine grew up in Nibutani, Hokkaido, falling asleep to cassette tapes of Ainu folk tales chosen by her father, an Ainu language teacher. Now in her mid-20s, she runs a YouTube channel teaching conversational Ainu.
The gap that remains is the classroom. Ainu is not part of the school curriculum in Hokkaido. Tahara argues that its future stays uncertain until it is.
