Ainu is a
language native to
Japan, once spoken in northern
Honshu and the
islands of
Hokkaido and
Sakhalin but now practically
extinct. Most of the 150,000 people who claim to be ethnically Ainu speak only Japanese. Ainu is
unrelated to
Japanese and, like Japanese, it has no
proven links with any other languages of the
world.
Ainu is written in either a modified Katakana or a Latin script. The literature in Ainu is primarily oral, with rich collections of oral epic poetry called Yukar. A typical Ainu epic is in the first person, the imagined speaker being a god, goddess, human being or animal. They were most often performed by women: one, Imekanu (1875-1961), after her retirement from work as a Christian missionary, wrote down more than 20,000 pages of epics from her own repertoire.
-- Source: Andrew Dalby's Dictionary of Languages