Aynu Itah · itah.aynu.org

A Grammar of Sakhalin Ainu

A reference grammar of the Ainu language of Sakhalin (樺太 Karafuto, Сахалин), the language its speakers called enciw itah — with interlinear examples drawn from attested texts and linked to the dictionary on this site.

Preface

Sakhalin Ainu is the variety of Ainu once spoken across the southern half of Sakhalin island. Its last fully fluent speakers died in the 1990s, but it is among the better documented Ainu varieties: Bronisław Piłsudski transcribed and translated a large body of texts at the beginning of the twentieth century, Chiri Mashiho built his アイヌ語法研究 (1942) around it, and from the 1960s onward Murasaki Kyōko recorded and analysed the speech of the last generation, above all that of Asai Take. This grammar stands on that work. It is not the first description of Sakhalin Ainu — Piłsudski (1912), Chiri (1942) and Murasaki (1976; 1979) each contain one — but it aims to be the first full-length reference grammar of the language in English: a single, systematically organised description that covers phonology, morphology, and syntax, incorporates the analytical advances of recent work by Anna Bugaeva, Elia Dal Corso, Sakaguchi Ryō, and others, and supports every claim with attested, cited data.

Every numbered example is glossed morpheme by morpheme following the Leipzig Glossing Rules and carries a citation of its original source and a dialect tag. The examples come from the published record of the language: Piłsudski’s Materials, the texts embedded in Dobrotvorsky’s dictionary of 1875, the letters and book of Sentoku Tarōji, the folktales of Asai Take, the recordings edited in the Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim series, and the grammatical literature. Ainu words in examples are linked to the dictionary of this site, which in turn links each word to a searchable corpus, so the path from a grammatical statement to the primary record is never more than two clicks long.

Unless a dialect tag says otherwise, statements describe the West-coast varieties documented by Chiri and Murasaki, which form the core of the twentieth-century record; East-coast data, chiefly from Piłsudski and Sentoku, are flagged as such, and Hokkaidō Ainu appears only where a comparison clarifies the Sakhalin facts. Where the published literature is silent, the description rests on our own analysis of the text corpus, and the prose says so explicitly.

Contents

Part I · The language and its setting

  1. Introduction

    What this grammar sets out to do, the data and conventions it relies on, how to read its glossed examples, and the dialect labels and scholarship behind them.

  2. The language and its speakers

    Sakhalin Ainu and its names, its speakers and their history, language contact, endangerment, and documentation.

  3. Dialects, sources, and previous research

    The West and East coast dialect groups, the major text collections and recordings, and earlier grammatical descriptions.

  4. Orthography and transcription

    How Sakhalin Ainu has been written — in Latin, Cyrillic, and katakana — and the romanisation used in this grammar.

Part II · Phonology

  1. Phonology

    Consonants and vowels, syllable structure, the coda system and h-neutralisation, vowel length, and prosody.

  2. Morphophonology

    Alternations at morpheme boundaries: coda alternations, vowel-initial allomorphy, possessive-suffix vowel copying, and sandhi.

Part III · Word classes and the noun phrase

  1. Word classes

    The parts of speech of Sakhalin Ainu and the criteria that distinguish them.

  2. Nouns and possession

    Noun morphology, the possessive (“belonging”) form, inalienable and alienable possession, and locative nouns.

  3. Number

    Nominal plurality with utara and -ahcin, associative plurals, and number in the verb.

  4. Pronouns and demonstratives

    Personal pronouns, the indefinite person, demonstratives, and interrogative–indefinite words.

  5. Numerals and quantification

    The vigesimal numeral system, classifier suffixes, ordinals, and quantifiers.

  6. Postpositions and relational nouns

    Case postpositions, relational (locative) nouns, and adverbial particles.

Part IV · The verb

  1. Verb structure and transitivity

    The verbal template, strict transitivity classes, verbal number, and suppletion.

  2. Person marking and alignment

    The person-marking paradigms, the indefinite person set, portmanteau prefixes, and morphological alignment.

  3. Valency-changing morphology

    Causatives, applicatives, the antipassive, reflexive and reciprocal prefixes, and noun incorporation.

  4. Tense, aspect, and modality

    The tenseless verb, aspectual periphrasis with teh an and kusu an, the perfect, and modal predicates.

  5. Evidentiality

    The reportative manu, inferential and sensory evidential constructions, and their interaction with person.

  6. Negation

    Standard negation with hannehka, the prohibitive, negative existence, and the history of the negative system.

Part V · Syntax

  1. Copula, existence, and possession clauses

    The copula ne, the existential verbs an and okay, locational clauses, and existential possession.

  2. The simple clause and word order

    Argument expression and omission, constituent order, adjuncts, and clause types including questions and commands.

  3. Nominalization

    Nominalization with pe/p, usi, hi, and the possessive-suffix strategy; headless and lexical nominalizations.

  4. Relative clauses

    Prenominal relativization, accessible positions, and the relation between relative clauses and noun incorporation.

  5. Complementation

    Complement clauses with kuni, hi/humi/hawe/ruwe and bare complements; complement-taking predicates.

  6. Clause linking

    Conjunctive particles teh, wa, kusu, yayne, cooccurrence with manu, and clause chaining in narrative.

  7. Information structure

    Topic marking with anah(ka), focus particles, word-order variation, and discourse particles.

Part VI · The lexicon and language contact

  1. Language contact and loanwords

    Loanwords from Japanese, the Manchu–Amur trade network, Nivkh, and Russian; their phonological adaptation and morphological integration; and the Cyrillic epistolary register.

Part VII · Texts

  1. Glossed texts

    Fully glossed Sakhalin Ainu texts: a tuytah told by Asai Take, a letter by Sentoku Tarōji, and an extract from Piłsudski’s materials.

Back matter

How to cite

Aynu Itah. 2026. A Grammar of Sakhalin Ainu. Online: https://itah.aynu.org/grammar (accessed date).