Japanese language

Japanese language (Nihongo) is an East Asian language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, and its relation to other languages, such as Korean, is debated. Japanese has been grouped with language families like Altaic, Austronesian, and Uralic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance.

History

The history of the Japanese language begins around the 3rd century, during the Yayoi period, when the Japanese archipelago was inhabited by the Yamato people. The earliest known inscriptions in Japanese are the Kofun period inscriptions dating from the 5th to 7th centuries.

Writing system

Japanese is written with a combination of three scripts: Hiragana, derived from the Chinese cursive script, Katakana, derived as a shorthand from Chinese characters, and Kanji, imported from China. The Latin script is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer.

Grammar

Japanese grammar is agglutinative and has a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary indicating the relative status of speaker and listener.

Dialects

There are many dialects of Japanese, which are generally mutually intelligible, including Tokyo dialect, Osaka dialect, and Hokkaido dialect. The Ryukyuan languages, also part of the Japonic language family to which Japanese belongs, are spoken in the Ryukyu Islands; however, few Japanese speakers are fluent in these languages.

Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese involves mastering not only vocabulary and grammar, but also the nuances of Japanese culture and Japanese etiquette, which are deeply intertwined with the language.

See also

• Japanese literature
• Japanese phonology
• Japanese grammar
• Japanese dialects
• Japanese writing system