Ebook: Contemporary condition and perspectives of Ainu language

St.Petersburg and Chiba: Cultural Anthropology and Ethnosemiotics (CAES) Vol.1, №1 (March 2015), p. 3-23.Contemporary Ainu population is about 30,000. Data provided by anthropologists show us that number of Ainu language speakers is much less than total number of Ainu. Also data provided by different scholars differ seriously. In order to clear these questions in 2006 I went to the island of Hokkaido and managed there field research with support of Japan Foundation. Having got the following definition of speaker: speaker of a certain language is person that can produce spontaneous utterances, I have learned that about 2 percents of total number of Ainu can be considered as Ainu speakers. Also I saw that Ainu didn’t care much of maintaining and normal functioning of their language but they were mostly interested in so called ‘ethnographic theater’. Despite the paper was written in 2006 yet its publishing met serious obstacles due to contradictions of my conclusion with official mythology of Japanese Ainu studies.