{"id":852,"date":"2009-01-06T09:36:26","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T08:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=852"},"modified":"2009-01-06T09:36:26","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T08:36:26","slug":"ainu-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=852","title":{"rendered":"Ainu language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An <a href=\"http:\/\/bumali.com\/09ainu.shtml\">article<\/a> I came across today talks about the Ainu language in which the author, a Russian linguist, talks of his quest to find Ainu speakers in Hokkaido. He met plenty of Ainu but found only two people able to speak the language.<\/p>\n<p>He does find quite a few people who know a few words or Ainu and can recite poems and sing songs, even though they don\u2019t understand them, but as he defines \u2019speak\u2019 as the ability \u201cto produce spontaneous utterances\u201d, he doesn\u2019t classify these people as speakers. Everywhere he goes, he hears the Ainu speaking Japanese, even in an Ainu language class.<\/p>\n<p>He tentatively concludes that the number of Ainu speakers might be as many as 600, or 2% of the 30,000 people who identify themselves as Ainu. This figure is a lot higher than that reported in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ethnologue.com\/show_language.asp?code=ain\">Ethnologue<\/a> (15), or by Murasaki Kyoko, a Japanese anthropologist who said there were 5 or 6 speakers in 2003.<\/p>\n<p>A correspondent has asked me whether I know of any resources (in English) for learning Ainu. Can you suggest any?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An article I came across today talks about the Ainu language in which the author, a Russian linguist, talks of his quest to find Ainu speakers in Hokkaido. He met plenty of Ainu but found only two people able to speak the language. He does find quite a few people who know a few words [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,10,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-endangered-languages","category-language","category-language-revival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}