Chapter 9Pronouns and demonstratives

9.1 Personal pronouns

Table 1 gives the forms attested in Sakhalin sources. Each pronoun belongs to one of the person series of Chapter 13 and obeys the personal agreement rule stated there: a pronoun co-occurs only with verbal affixes of its own series.

The pronouns are built on the person prefixes plus ani ‘being’ in the singular and okay ‘exist.PL’ in the plural; their grammatical number follows the series, not the reference, so ciokay and anokay are formally plural even when they mean ‘I’ (Chapter 13). Genre and dialect sort the first persons sharply. In our counts, the three Sentoku Tarōji (千徳太郎治) letters use cokay 32 times, anokay 7 times, eani ~ iani 23 times, and kuani never; Asai Take's west-coast tales have kuani 38 times, eani 10, anoka 6, and cokay never. Chiri's consultants felt kuani to be the politer choice beside homely anokay, and treated ciokay and anokay as interchangeable (Chiri 1942: §90); the CI-pronoun is at home on the east coast and the southern west coast and marginal in Rayciska (Sakaguchi 2024: 27–29).

Syntactically the pronoun is an optional adjunct that doubles an argument already indexed on the verb, whatever its role: subject, object, or possessor (kuani ku-cipihi ne ‘it is MY boat’, (Chiri 1942: §91)):

9.2 The indefinite-person pronoun anoka(y)

anoka ‘I, we’ ~ anokay is the pronoun of the AN-series and shares its whole range — ‘we’, ‘I’, unspecified people, narrative first person — described in Chapter 13. Two points belong here. First, the dedicated plural anokay-ahcin, with the nominal plural =ahcin of Chapter 8, disambiguates ‘we’ from ‘I’; Hattori found it meaning ‘we’ for Rayciska speakers in their twenties and thirties but ‘I’ for men over sixty — the plural pronoun travelling the same plural-to-singular road as the AN-series itself (Hattori 1961: 6), (Sakaguchi 2020b: 6). Yamabe's autobiography has anokay-ahsin 102 times against anokay-utara 14 (Sakaguchi 2020b: 6):

Second, like the other pronouns it is an emphatic adjunct, and it freely takes numeral appositions: anoka tu-aynu-ne sap-an ‘the two of us will go down’ (Chapter 8, example there). Within quoted dialogue it alternates with kuani by register, not by meaning; the choice of pronoun simply follows the person series chosen on the verb.

9.3 Demonstratives

Demonstratives divide into spatial (exophoric) and anaphoric series, and each form is either adnominal or pronominal, the pronominals being built from the adnominals with the nominalizers -pe ~ -h (Chiri 1942: §83, §97), (Murasaki 2025: 11, 13). Table 2 assembles the attested system.

The spatial system is two-term at base — speaker-near tan against speaker-far tara, with no ‘that (by you)’ : ‘that (yonder)’ split (Murasaki 2025: 11) — plus an emphatic far form. Hokkaidō distal to(an) is absent from Sakhalin, where too is only ‘lake’ and ‘day’; the distal slot is tara(-an), literally ‘being there’, a Sakhalin–Kuril retention (Chiri 1942: §97). The plural adnominals contain okay ‘exist.PL’ and pluralise the noun phrase by themselves (neeroh nuso-utara ‘those sledges’, Chapter 8); a plural form is never used of a singular referent, though the singular may stand for plurals (Sakaguchi 2020b: 16). Only tan compounds with time nouns: tanto ‘today’, tanpa ‘this year’ (Chiri 1942: §99), (Murasaki 2025: 20).

9.4 Interrogatives

The interrogatives of Sakhalin Ainu are nouns and adverbs built on three roots, hem-, ne- ~ na- and tema- (Chiri 1942: §104). The attested inventory, with token counts from the Asai Take corpus where it occurs there: hemata ‘what’ ‘what’ (162), naata ‘who’ ‘who’ (6; also nata in Piłsudski's texts, (Sakaguchi 2020a: 195)), temana ‘how’ ‘how, what kind of’ (22), nahta ‘where; which’ (2), neyta ‘where’ (1), nakene ‘whither’, nahwa ‘whence’, nakoro(ke)he ‘where; whose’, hempara ‘when’, hempah(no) ‘how many, how much’, hemata kusu ‘why’ (Murasaki 2025: 19). Adnominal interrogatives are hemanu ‘which’, connective-built neran and temana-an ‘what kind of’ (Chiri 1942: §104). Hokkaidō nen ‘who’ and nep ‘what’ are unattested in Sakhalin material — in Piłsudski nen occurs only as a variant of neno ‘like’ (Piłsudski 1912: 247) — and the person interrogative is uniformly na(a)ta.

Interrogatives stand in situ in the position of the questioned constituent, usually with the final particle hii ~ hee closing the clause (Murasaki 2025: 18); there is no interrogative inversion. In content questions the verb commonly appears in its nominalized form (e-makan-i above; (Chiri 1942: §40)).

9.5 Indefinite uses: interrogative + ka

As across the family, interrogatives double as indefinites when followed by ka ‘even, also’: hemata ka ‘something’ (nine tokens in the Asai corpus), temana ka ‘somehow, in some way or other’ (five), neyta ka ‘somewhere’, hempara ka ‘at some time, ever’ (Murasaki 2025: 51). Under negation the same string is a negative indefinite, ‘nothing, nobody’. Beside the interrogative roots the defective noun nee ~ neh ‘some(thing)’ serves the same construction: nee aynu ka isam ‘there is nobody’, neera ampe ka isam ‘there is nothing’ (Murasaki 2025: 17), and Dobrotvorsky's nineteenth-century conversations already show nera ham ariki kusuiki ‘no one (of any kind) will come’ (Dobrotvorsky 1875), (Sakaguchi 2020a: 190).

9.6 Reflexives and intensifiers

There are no reflexive or reciprocal pronouns: the verbal prefixes yay- ~ si- ‘self’ and u- ‘each other’ do that work (Chiri 1942: §81) (Chapter 14). What the language does have are adverbial intensifiers: yaykota ‘oneself, of one's own accord’, attested in Piłsudski's texts (yaykota e-koro kun-pe ne ‘it is something you must keep yourself’, and example (7) above; (Sakaguchi 2020a: 195)); sinenehka ‘alone, by oneself’, with 35 tokens the everyday form in Asai Take's tales; and appositive anihi ‘X himself’ (§9.1.1). The emphatic doubling function that other languages assign to reflexive pronouns falls in Sakhalin Ainu to the personal pronouns themselves, which exist for little else.