About History of the Japanese Ainu of Hokkinawa Island...?

Question

Since the Ainu history is not written and is spread only by mouth to ear from generation to generation, and that actually only 20 of them speaking their original tongue are still alive today (the Japanese (chinese decent) has forced their population to speak modern japanese in place of their ancestral language), then how it will be possible to save their history? Does anybody have heard about new study suggesting that they were the REAL Samourai, and most of the Japanese culture as evolved around theirs (the Ainu arrived in Japan about 30000 years ago while the modern Japanese arrived in 600B.C only)?

Edit:
Their history has never been recorded in any ways! The Japanese government only seek to supress it... Look like it could be embarrasing for them I guess...
And I can't see many that can translate their history either... Who can speek Ainu today?

Answer 1

Not that I'm an expert, but I thought there were a lot more than 20 original speakers around, probably more like 20,000 Ainu around but a lot have resorted to speaking the Yamato Japanese language to avoid further ostracisation. By the way, I think you mean Hokkaido, the northernmost island, there is no Hokkinawa island (unless you mean Okinawa, which is a different island and people).

The odds don't look good - As a people they are thinning out, and the Yamato culture is such that anything that is even slightly "unJapanese" in appearance is frowned upon, so they are pretty marginalised and not even considered Japanese by some Yamato.

If there is any hope of reviving the language you can't just think about the language on its own, you have to make it economically useful to learn the language, you also have to use the language in the culture such that you need to learn it or else you can't function in the local culture, and that isn't going to happen easily.

The most studied languages around in any given era are due in part to the reality that if a certain country is useful for economic trade or dialogue, then people will learn it. Japanese (Yamato) is only popular because of its economic status, otherwise it wouldn't be studied that much because apart from the islands of Japan and some small communities in Brazil and the US, it isn't spoken in that many countries, and I think Japanese is the majority language in only Japan and Okinawa.

I thought about learning Dutch once, that is until I read that a lot of people there understand English, and there's really no point learning it. Unless the Ainu decide to only use Ainu on their signs, in their localities, their dialogue with the outside world, unless they begin to somehow propagate the use of the language on the world stage (and I don't know how that can be done) then no-one will find it worth the time and effort to learn it, when so few speak it. You can record audio and video till you run out of tape, but it won't do more than preserve it the way Latin is preserved - learnable, but effectively dead.

Answer 2

Once oral history gets into the modern world, then it can be written or recorded. Just because it was oral in centuries past, doesn't mean it has to remain that way today. There are many groups who have similar issues, in all of the Americas as well as in Africa and Asia. It's not unheard of for a language to disappear completely and the people who spoke them as well.

As to the Ainu being the original Samurai, that is a theory that has quite a few detractors. Many groups would like to connect to this ancient honorable society, but it's not likely the mantel of originality will end up on the shoulders of the Ainu.