In 1955 and 1956, the authors and others were able to investigate the Ainu dialects, which were on the point of dying out. Some of the informants were the last surviving speaker or speakers of the dialects, and all of them were very old people. Some of them even have died since our investigation. In this article, we present the lexicostatistic data of 19 dialects, of which 13 are those of Hokkaido and 6 are those of Sakhalin. All the field work was done in Hokkaido. Some informants spoke Ainu fluently, but others spoke imperfectly and were unable to remember several words. In §4 (Table I on p.37∿p.59), the Ainu words are arranged according to Swadesh's 200 item list. In §5 (cf. Table II inserted), cognate residues are marked with +; non-cognates with -; cognates and non-cognates with±(when one or both of the dialects have two forms, and the inperfectness of the record does not allow us to decide which is more basic); questionable etymology or choice with ○; doubtful record with?; no answer given with・; lacuna of record with ( ). On Table II, all + have been omitted, except for ±. In §6, problematic points in the computation of residues are discussed. In §7 (Table III and Fig.2), the percentages of the residual cognates are shown in figures and graphs. In §8, the significance of the figures on Table III (Fig.2) is discussed. It is pointed out among other things that there is a remarkable gap between Hokkaido dialects and those of Sakhalin, Soya, the northernmost of Hokkaido, being the closest to the Sakhalin dialects. A significant gap is also seen between Samani on the one hand, and Niikappu, Hiratori, and Nukkibetsu on the other, which coincides with the discrepancies in other culture and customs, etc. In §9, the data on Table I are examined from the view-point of linguistic geography. In §10, questions concerning the computation of time-depth are referred to. In §11, the items, with regard to which the Hokkaido and Sakhalin dialects diverge from each other, are compared with those with regard to which the Ryukyuan and the Japanese dialects diverge from each other. It is found that the only common item in the two lists is 47. knee. Thus, it is possible to state that Ainu and Japanese have had the tendency to change in different directions, in so far as the 200 item list is concerned. In §12, it is pointed out that Japanese loanwords in Ainu and Chinese loan-words in Japanese are very few in so far as the list is concerned. Hattori does not think it impossible that the root √<kur> of Ainu and the forms of Japanese, Korean, Tunguse, and Turkic (on p.66) are cognates from the possible parent language of all these languages. It is hoped to promote comparative study of this kind.
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