I am an Ainu. However, sometimes when I tell people I was born not in Hokkaidō, but in Tokyo, and was raised in Saitama Prefecture, it brings the conversation to a halt, as if they are thinking, “Oh, ...

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 ...

An online “talking dictionary” first launched in 2009 is attempting to preserve and pass on the Ainu language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Japan's northeastern island of Hokkaido and ...

An Ainu woman is no longer remaining silent but speaking out against a lawmaker’s continued discriminatory remarks toward the ...

The Ainu language has been declared critically endangered by UNESCO, with few people left alive today who speak it. The Ainu are Japan's indigenous population and Japan Times contributor Mara Budgen ...

Almost every 14 days, a language dies; that’s about 26 languages a year. And over 2,500 Indigenous languages are currently in danger of disappearing forever — that’s more than a third of our world’s ...

Like other indigenous groups, the Ainu people of Hokkaido and the north-eastern Honshu island of Japan have experienced marginalization. After the Japanese government annexed their territory in 1890, ...

More than a century after colonisation, the Ainu language almost vanished. Now machines are listening to hours of old recordings and learning to give it a new voice. The cassette player would catch ...

(Soundbite of archived audio) KUHN: Today, many younger Ainu know of their language in culture only from recordings, like this one at the cultural center. After years of lobbying by Sawai and other ...

Japan is a nation that often presents itself as ethnically homogenous, but in fact it has an indigenous population called the Ainu. These hunter-gatherers worshiped nature and animals, spoke a ...

Like other indigenous groups, the Ainu people of Hokkaido and the north-eastern Honshu island of Japan have experienced marginalization. After the Japanese government annexed their territory in 1890, ...