Ainu

Ainu is the language of the Ainu people of Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, and forms a small language family on its own; no link to any other family has been demonstrated. Place-name evidence suggests it was once spoken in northern Honshu, perhaps by the Emishi, and that the northern Japanese river-name ending -betsu comes from pet, meaning river. The word aynu means person.

From the 1300s Ainu met Japanese traders and settlers, and their language took in many Japanese loanwords while giving a few in return. It also exchanged vocabulary with the neighboring Nivkh.

Its classical form, preserved in oral epics, was polysynthetic. It had no native script and was later written in modified Japanese katakana and Latin letters. On Sakhalin it long served as a lingua franca used by Japanese and Russian officials as well as local peoples.