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Special Supplements / Ainu language special Feb 21, 2022

Efforts underway to save Ainu language and culture

Chances are you haven’t met an Ainu speaker in Japan. After all, Google’s Endangered Languages Project puts the number of native speakers at fewer than five. But the Ainu people once populated a wide swath of northern Japan, stretching from Tohoku to Hokkaido, the ...

Special Supplements / Ainu language special Feb 21, 2022

Respected comic book spurs hope for indigenous tongue

In 2009, UNESCO in its “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” designated the Ainu language as being critically endangered. As the most dire of the five categories — only extinct is worse — used in the report, it highlighted the precarious state that ...