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Useful studies for the Ainu people and Ainu language (included):

A genetic study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama in 2013 found that the Ainu people (including samples from Hokkaido and Tōhoku) are closer to ancient and modern Northeast Asians (especially Udege people of eastern Siberia) than opposed to the geographically close Kantō Jōmon period samples. According to the authors, these results add to the internal-diversity observed among the Jōmon period population and that a significant percentage of the Jōmon period people had ancestry from a Northeast Asian source population, suggested to be the source of the proto-Ainu language and culture.

A genetic study in 2016 about historical Ainu samples from southern Sakhalin (8) and Hokkaido (4), found that these samples were closely related to ancient Okhotsk people and various other Northeast Asians, such as indigenous populations in Kamchatka and North America. The authors conclude that this points to heterogeneity among Ainu, as other studies reported a rather isolated position of analyzed Ainu samples of southern Hokkaido.

The Ainu are the native people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. Early Ainu-speaking groups (mostly hunters and fishermen) migrated also into the Kamchatka Peninsula and Honshu, were their descendants are today known as the Matagi hunters. Evidence for Ainu-speakers in the Amur region is found through Ainu loanwords in the Uilta and Ulch people. In southern Hokkaido and Honshu, the Ainu-speakers mixed with the semi-agriculturalist Satsumon culture people, which themselves are suggested to have formed from the diverse Honshu-Jōmon and Yayoi/Kofun rice-agriculturalist and migrated into southern Hokkaido after the expansion of the Yamato people. Evidence for Ainu-speaking hunters migrating down from northern Hokkaido to Honshu is evident in the Ainu toponyms which are found in several places of northern Honshu, mostly among the western coast and the Tōhoku region.

The Ainu languages share a noteworthy amount of vocabulary (especially fish names) with several Northeast Asian languages, including Nivkh, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan. While linguistic evidence point to an origin of these words among the Ainu languages, its spread and how this words arrived into other languages will possibly remain a mystery.

Some linguists noted that the Ainu language was an important lingua franca in Sakhalin. Asahi (2005) reported that the status of the Ainu language was rather high and was also used by early Russian and Japanese administrative officials to communicate with each other and with the indigenous people.