Ainu language

Hokkaido Ainu
アイヌ・イタㇰ Ainu-itak
Multilingual sign in Japanese, Ainu, English, Korean, and Chinese. The Ainu text, in katakana, is second down from the top on the right side of the sign. It reads イヤイライケㇾ (iyairaiker), meaning "thank you".
Pronunciation	[ˈainu iˈtak]
Native to	Japan
Region	Hokkaido
Ethnicity	25,000 (1986) to ca. 200,000 (no date) Ainu people[1]
Native speakers	5+ (2008)[2]
Language family	Ainu Hokkaido Ainu
Writing system	Katakana (current) Latin (current)
Language codes
ISO 639-2	ain
ISO 639-3	ain
Glottolog	ainu1240
ELP	Ainu (Japan) Ainu (Japan)
Ainu is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger [3]
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Ainu (アイヌ・イタㇰ, Ainu-itak), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu (Japanese: 北海道アイヌ語), is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate with no academic consensus of origin. It is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Until the 20th century, the Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu and the now-extinct Kuril Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu – were spoken throughout Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands. Due to the colonization policy employed by the Japanese government, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers decreased through the 20th century, and it is now moribund. A very low number of elderly people still speak the language fluently, though attempts are being made to revive it.