World Language Map

Where is Hokkaido Ainu spoken?

Hokkaido Ainu is an Ainu language, spoken in Japan. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Hokkaido Ainu is spoken

Hokkaido Ainu is spoken in one country: Japan.

Country
Japan

On the map, Hokkaido Ainu is drawn as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643489), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Hokkaido Ainu.

How many people speak Hokkaido Ainu?

Wikidata gives about 10 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Hokkaido Ainu sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Hokkaido Ainu as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Ainu
  2. Hokkaido-Kuril Ainu
  3. Hokkaido Ainu

More about Hokkaido Ainu

Codes: ISO 639-3 ain, Glottolog ainu1240. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Hokkaido Ainu

Where is Hokkaido Ainu spoken?

Hokkaido Ainu is spoken in Japan. On the map it is shown as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia).

How many people speak Hokkaido Ainu?

Wikidata gives about 10 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Hokkaido Ainu in?

Glottolog places Hokkaido Ainu in the Ainu family, in the branch Hokkaido-Kuril Ainu.

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