Ainu

Ainu is not related to Japanese. It shares no grammar with it and no inherited vocabulary, and the words the two languages hold in common travelled between neighbours rather than down from a common ancestor. Attempts to attach Ainu to a wider family have been made repeatedly, toward the Altaic grouping, toward Austroasiatic, toward Austronesian, and none has been accepted. It stands as an isolate, and the honest description of it is that its relatives, if it had any, are gone.

Its own grammar is unlike that of its neighbour in ways that matter for reading its literature. Ainu is polysynthetic: a single verb can carry the subject, the object, the applicative that says what the action is done with or for, and the incorporated noun, so that a clause in Ainu can correspond to a sentence in English. Person is marked on the verb, and the marking distinguishes a form used when the speaker is narrating as someone else, which is precisely the form the epics need.

There were three main varieties, in Hokkaido, in Sakhalin and in the Kurils. The Sakhalin and Kuril varieties have no remaining speakers. Hokkaido Ainu was itself dialectally diverse, and what is documented is uneven, because the recording was done by outsiders at different dates and with different interests.

Ainu had no script of its own. It has been written in the Japanese katakana syllabary, which suits it poorly, and in Latin transcriptions devised for dictionaries and for the publication of oral literature. Almost everything the atlas can say about Ainu religion passes through one of those transcriptions.

Ainu religion has no scripture and no priesthood. What it has instead is a body of chanted oral literature, and the language is inseparable from it. The kamuy yukar, the songs of the kamuy, are narrated in the first person by the kamuy itself: the bear, the owl, the fox or the fire tells the audience what happened to it and what it thought about the humans it met. The effect is not decorative. It is the theological content of the form. A kamuy is a person with a point of view, and the grammar of the song obliges the audience to occupy it.

Each song carries a refrain, a fixed burden repeated at intervals through the narrative, which identifies the song and marks its rhythm as the chanter beats time. The refrains are often untranslatable, and collectors have generally left them as sound.

The literature was recorded late and largely by outsiders. Missionary and ethnographic collectors compiled dictionaries, grammars and texts from the late nineteenth century onward, and the material they left is the main documentary basis for what is known. One collection stands apart because it was made from inside: a young Ainu woman transcribed the kamuy yukar she had learned from her grandmother, in Latin letters, and translated them into Japanese herself, and the volume appeared in 1923.

Because the religious register lives in this literature and not in a text of rules, the loss of the language and the loss of the tradition are the same loss, which is why revival work centres on the songs.