About Aynu Itah

Aynu Itah (aynu itah, “the Ainu language”) is a free, open resource for Sakhalin Ainu — the variety of Ainu once spoken across the southern half of Sakhalin island (樺太 Karafuto, Сахалин), which its speakers called enciw itah. It has two halves: a searchable dictionary and a modern reference grammar.

The dictionary

The dictionary collects Sakhalin Ainu words with their Japanese, English, and Russian glosses. Each headword is shown in three scripts (Latin, kana, and Cyrillic), with its part of speech, corpus frequency, demoted word-forms (possessed, plural, valency-changed, and so on), and — where they exist — its same-etymon correspondences in Hokkaidō Ainu. Every entry has its own page (for example cise) that you can link to and cite, and links out to the Kampisos corpus, where each word can be seen in attested sentences.

Frequencies are counted over the digitised text corpus; the headword list is compiled from the published lexicographic record (below) and reconciled against that corpus. Forms and Hokkaidō correspondences are added by analysis and are marked as attested or reconstructed.

The reference grammar

The grammar is a full-length English-language reference description of Sakhalin Ainu — phonology, morphology, and syntax — with interlinear examples drawn from attested texts, glossed by the Leipzig rules, and linked back to this dictionary. See its preface and references for sources and method.

Sources

The dictionary draws on, among others:

• 公益財団法人アイヌ民族文化財団「単語リスト（アイヌ語・日本語）：カラフト」 (the FF-Ainu Karafuto word list)
• 日本語ウィクショナリー「カテゴリ:アイヌ語」 (Japanese Wiktionary)
• 富田隆『アイヌ語電子辞書』 (Tomita Takashi, Ainu electronic dictionary)
• 村崎恭子 編訳『浅井タケ昔話全集 I, II』 (Murasaki Kyōko, ed., Asai Take folktales)
• the Kampisos text corpus, for frequencies and attestations

How to cite

Aynu Itah. 2026. A dictionary of Sakhalin Ainu. Online: https://itah.aynu.org/ (accessed [date]).

Licence

The site’s content and dictionary data are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0): you may share and adapt them, including commercially, provided you give attribution and release any derivative under the same licence. The underlying source materials remain the property of their respective authors and publishers; please also credit the sources listed above where relevant.

Contributing & contact

Corrections and additions are welcome. Join the Discordウエカリヒ, or find more Ainu-language projects at Aynu.org.