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From https://www.languagemagazine.com/2019/02/19/japan-recognizes-ainu/

Japan Recognizes Ainu
February 19, 2019

The Japanese government has endorsed a bill to officially recognize the Ainu ethnic minority as an indigenous people of Japan for the first time and calls for “the creation of a society in which they can take pride in their heritage.” However, the move may have come too late to save the Ainu language, now spoken by only a handful of people.

The bill includes a subsidy program for regional revitalization to help local authorities implement projects to promote Ainu culture. It also calls for deregulation to make it easier for the Ainu people to gather wood in state-owned forests and catch salmon in local rivers, as part of efforts to help them preserve their cultural traditions.

...The bill still needs to be passed by the Diet (Japan’s legislature) which will likely happen during the current session.

...Ainu is a language isolate, unrelated to any other language, spoken only on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido by less than a hundred people. It was once spoken in the Kurile Islands, the northern part of Honshu and the southern half of Sakhalin, which is now part of Russia.

Read the full article at https://www.languagemagazine.com/2019/02/19/japan-recognizes-ainu/