I've been casually studying Itak on and off in between my usual schoolwork and
obvious Japanese studies. However, I've been more and more bothered by a
particular issue as I've gone on: how does one go about romanizing Itak from
standard katakana?

I'm aware that [this
site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language#Special_katakana_for_the_Ainu_language)
boasts a small guide, but that doesn't really work too well when the
[dictionary](http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~oyama/boukenn-folder/bouken-ainugo-
ziten.htm) you're using doesn't follow those rules. I'm not sure if a standard
guide even exists, but less how to go about transliterating this language to
English characters. I've seen odd ones where people will write a name like
"cup=kamuy", when I'll see others write as "Chupkamui". There are probably a
ton of variations like with Japanese as well, but I lack the understanding of
which ones are standard, which are more widely understood, and which are
better to use overall.

Any and all advice one has on this will be taken into account and greatly
appreciated. If further clarification is needed, feel free to ask. Thank you
for reading this.
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question
rōmaji ainu
How would one go about romanizing Aynu Itak?
I'm not sure that there is a good standard, but it may or may not matter,
given the relatively tiny audience there is for any such transliterated
material. Anna Bugaeva is one person who's written a good deal of scientific
papers in English about Aynu, and you might use her transliteration as a
starting point.

Personally, I just transcribe it however seems best to me, which generally
involves making it look as much like a language people actually use as I can -
I throw out the equals sign entirely (since anywhere else that's just a
technical notation for clitic attachment), and I tend to use ch and y for
others' c and i. I'd love to see a kanji/hiragana orthography for Aynu, since
the katakana one looks so much more like a scientific transcription than a
language someone actually speaks, but that's not an easy thing to do.

In short, figure out how it actually sounds and romanise it however you like,
but feel free to use the existing scientific literature as a guide if you
want.
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The _de facto_ standard method for transcribing Ainu (both in Latin alphabet
and in _katakana_ ) being used today is the one proposed in _Akor Itak_ , a
textbook published by the Hokkaido Utari Association (now Hokkaido Ainu
Association) in 1994. It is often referred to as “(nearly) phonemic
transcription” ((簡易)音素表記 in Japanese). What makes it different from some of
the older romanization methods (e.g. the one devised by Batchelor in his
_Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary_ ) is the usage of ⟨c⟩, ⟨s⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨w⟩, where
others would use ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨u⟩ respectively (the last two rules only
apply in syllable-final position, after a vowel). For example, the words
transcribed as “ikkeu” and “kamui-chep” by Batchelor are written as “ikkew”
and “kamuycep” in modern dictionaries. Apart from that, the equal sign “=” is
used to indicate personal affixes (e.g. “ci=nukar”, rather than “chinukar”).
For more examples, you may refer to the following resources (all of them apply
the romanization standard described above):

  * [Topical Dictionary of Conversational Ainu](https://db4.ninjal.ac.jp/ainutopic/dictionary/en/);
  * [Ainu Language Archive](http://ainugo.ainu-museum.or.jp/) – the website is in Japanese, but one of the dictionaries they have (by Suzuko Tamura) includes English translations;
  * [Glossed Audio Corpus of Ainu Folklore](http://ainucorpus.ninjal.ac.jp/corpus/en/).
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answer