Kuril Ainu is an extinct and poorly attested
Ainu language
Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu (), 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 isola ...
of the
Kuril Islands
The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands are a volcanic archipelago administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Far East. The islands stretch approximately northeast from Hokkaido in Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, separating the ...
.
The main inhabited islands were
Kunashir
Kunashir Island (; ; ), possibly meaning ''Black Island'' or ''Grass Island'' in Ainu language, Ainu, is the southernmost island of the Kuril Islands. The island has been under Russia, Russian administration since the end of World War II, when S ...
,
Iturup and
Urup in the south, and
Shumshu in the north. Other islands either had small populations (such as
Paramushir) or were visited for fishing or hunting. There may have been a small mixed Kuril–
Itelmen population at the southern tip of the
Kamchatka Peninsula
The Kamchatka Peninsula (, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and western coastlines, respectively.
Immediately offshore along the Pacific ...
.
The Ainu of the Kurils appear to have been a relatively recent expansion from HokkaidÅ, displacing an indigenous
Okhotsk culture, which may have been related to the modern
Itelmens. When the Kuril Islands passed to Japanese control in 1875, many of the northern
Kuril Ainu evacuated to
Ust-Bolsheretsky District in Kamchatka, where about 100 still live. In the decades after the islands passed to Soviet control in 1945, most of the remaining southern Kuril Ainu evacuated to HokkaidÅ, where they have since been assimilated.
References
{{Paleosiberian languages
Ainu languages
Russian Ainu people
Extinct languages of Asia
Kuril Islands
Languages extinct in the 1960s
Indigenous languages of Siberia