Sakhalin Ainu language

Sakhalin Ainu was a language of the Ainu family spoken on the island of Sakhalin, now part of Russia. After the Soviet Union took control of Sakhalin following the Second World War, most Ainu there were deported to Japan, and the last Ainu household remaining on the island died out in the 1960s. The language itself went extinct on 30 April 1994 with the death of its final native speaker, Take Asai, also known as Tahkonanna. Sakhalin Ainu differed from its Hokkaido counterpart by preserving long vowels, a feature Hokkaido Ainu lost, and by merging certain consonants that Hokkaido Ainu kept distinct into a single fricative sound.