For Maya Sekine, the Ainu language arrived not in textbooks, but whispered from old cassette tapes. Her father played recordings of their Indigenous ancestors sharing folk tales, voices echoing from a time before their language nearly vanished under Japanese colonial rule.
These tapes were Sekine’s connection to a culture her generation rarely heard spoken. At school, her friends didn’t understand Ainu. Even within her family, Japanese was the primary language. She recognized a painful truth: her family’s heritage, tied deeply to the Ainu language, was fading.
A Language Near the Brink
The Ainu people, Indigenous to the northern regions of what is now Japan (primarily Hokkaido), historically spoke a distinct language with various dialects. Records from the 1870s, just after Japan officially incorporated Hokkaido (then Ezo/Ezochi), suggest around 15,000 speakers, most speaking little to no Japanese.
However, over a century of colonization brought oppressive government policies, including the outright banning of Ainu in schools. These measures severely impacted the language and culture. By the early 20th century, speaker numbers had plummeted, leaving only a handful of native speakers today. UNESCO currently lists the Ainu language as “Critically Endangered.”
Despite this devastating decline, there are signs of revival. In 2019, Japan finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people of the country, a legal shift aimed at fostering inclusion. Alongside policy changes, innovative projects are emerging to preserve and revitalize the language – some leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.
AI Listens to the Past
One such initiative, led by informatics professor Tatsuya Kawahara at Kyoto University, is employing AI speech recognition technology to process a rich archive of historical Ainu audio. These recordings, totaling around 700 hours collected since the 1970s, exist mainly on analog tapes – the same kind Maya Sekine listened to as a child.
Working with challenging source material – recordings often made in noisy environments with poor sound quality – Kawahara’s team has automated the painstaking process of transcription. They’ve focused initially on around 40 hours of recorded narrative prose stories (uwepeker), shared by Ainu cultural institutions.
Conventional speech recognition systems rely on massive datasets common for major languages. Since endangered languages like Ainu lack this extensive background data, researchers are utilizing “end-to-end” AI models. This approach allows the system to learn directly from the limited audio-text pairings without needing vast pre-existing linguistic knowledge.
Beyond transcription, the project is also developing AI speech synthesis, teaching machines to generate Ainu speech from written text. Early results are promising, with the AI successfully emulating speakers from whom significant recording hours exist. AI-generated audio versions of traditional stories have even been used to help train actors for performances at cultural institutions. To an untrained ear, the synthesized voices, though sometimes a bit rapid, capture natural elements like pauses and inflections.
Professor Kawahara envisions this technology becoming a valuable tool for learners, potentially enabling virtual Ainu teaching assistants or making historical voices accessible to new generations. He also aims to capture more diverse dialects and incorporate recordings from younger speakers to reflect the language’s evolution.
Balancing Hope and Ethical Concerns
While the potential of AI is significant, its application in the context of a marginalized community’s cultural heritage raises complex questions. Maya Sekine, now in her mid-20s and running a conversational Ainu YouTube channel, expresses caution. She worries about the AI potentially spreading mispronunciations or inaccuracies.
“Ainu people have to have knowledge about the language, so they can understand what is fake,” Sekine states, emphasizing the critical need for community members to be custodians of the language, not just consumers of AI output. She stresses the importance of “living data” – recordings made today by current speakers.
Initial wariness within the community about the AI project was understandable, given concerns about potential misuse or the creation of artificial speech. This echoes broader discussions around AI, where questions about data ownership, consent, and the ethical implications of using existing material, particularly sensitive cultural data, are paramount. While commercial AI models grapple with copyright issues over training data, the Ainu project navigates the equally delicate terrain of historical recordings from a community that has faced generations of exploitation.
Experts like David Ifeoluwa Adelani, a specialist in low-resource languages, highlight the necessity of building trust and transparency with communities. He points out that data collection should ideally empower, not exploit. Training community members to use these tools themselves is often a more ethical approach, ensuring priorities are set by those whose heritage is at stake.
For the Ainu, who have historically seen their culture commodified and appropriated, the potential for further exploitation of their linguistic data is a real concern. The sensitivity is heightened by historical injustices and ongoing discrimination faced by the Ainu people in Japan, who report experiencing prejudice and economic disadvantage.
Despite these complexities, there is support from within the community. Maya Sekine’s father, Kenji Sekine, himself a dedicated Ainu language teacher who began learning the Saru dialect in 1999, sees the AI project as a positive step. He helped source recordings and believes it can help more people learn.
A Living, Evolving Language
The challenges for Ainu revitalization extend beyond technology. Professor Hirofumi Kato notes that the mainstream Japanese education system still largely ignores Ainu culture and language, perpetuating a “mono-cultural perspective” that makes it hard for Ainu youth to connect with their roots.
Yet, the efforts of individuals like the Sekines, and the potential offered by new tools like AI, offer hope. The rapid development of AI for diverse languages globally suggests increasing possibilities for projects like the Ainu initiative, ideally driven by the speakers themselves.
The goal is not necessarily to perfectly replicate the language of the past, but to ensure its continued life. Younger generations are already contributing to this by coining new words, like “imeru kampi” for email (combining “lightning strike” and “letter”). As Kenji Sekine wisely observes, “The language itself won’t be the same as in ancient times, but that’s okay… Every language is living, lively – and changing.” The integration of AI into this revitalization effort is a testament to the resilience of the Ainu people and their determination to give their ancestral language a future voice.
