Ainu of Japan Resisting the Suppression of Languages

"This book shows that by moving away from code models that foster restrictive perceptions of language as learned words and rules, and towards an ecolinguistics capable of integrating with concepts of embodied cognition, it is possible to recognise a broad range of connections with a language from which an individual or community has become estranged. Using the Ainu of Japan, an indigenous population who are concurrently completely modern, as an example and comparator, this book reviews historical and contemporary suppression of languages as a means of, or as a bi-product of, the suppression of their speakers"--