Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan.

Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese equivalents of adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

History

Proto-Japonic, the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from either continental Asia or nearby Pacific islands sometime in the early- to mid-2nd century BC (the Yayoi period), replacing the languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants,^[8] including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language. Very little is known about the Japanese of this period. Because writing like the "Kanji" which later devolved into the writing systems "Hiragana" and "Katakana"^[7] had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence, and anything that can be discerned about this period of Japanese must be based on the reconstructions of Old Japanese.

Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language.

Due to these extra syllables, it has been hypothesized that Old Japanese's vowel system was larger than that of Modern Japanese – it perhaps contained up to eight vowels.

Geographic distribution

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been spoken outside.

Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil,^[19] with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendants, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than the 1.2 million of the United States^[20]) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese,^[21] with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially in the eastern states), Canada (especially in Vancouver where 1.4% of the population has Japanese ancestry^[22]), the United States (notably Hawaii, where 16.7% of the population has Japanese ancestry,^[23] and California), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao region and Laguna province).^[24][25][26]

Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan.

Dialects from peripheral regions, such as Tōhoku or Kagoshima, may be unintelligible to speakers from the other parts of the country. There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island whose dialects are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers.

The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (politically part of Kagoshima), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time.^[28] Most likely being the spoken form of Classical Japanese language, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began decline during the late Meiji period.^[14]

Modern Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including the Ryūkyū islands) due to education, mass media, and an increase of mobility within Japan, as well as economic integration.

Classification

Japanese is a member of the Japonic languages family, which also includes the languages spoken throughout the Ryūkyū Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is often called a language isolate.

According to Martine Irma Robbeets, Japanese has been subject to more attempts to show its relation to other languages than any other language in the world.^[30] Since Japanese first gained the consideration of linguists in the late 19th century, attempts have been made to show its genealogical relation to languages or language families such as Ainu, Korean, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Ural-Altaic, Altaic, Uralic, Mon–Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian and Ryukyuan. At the fringe, some linguists have suggested a link to Indo-European languages, including Greek, and to Lepcha. As it stands, only the link to Ryukyuan has wide support.^[31]

Modern main theories tried to link Japanese on the one hand to northern Asian languages, like Korean or the bigger Altaic family (also sometimes known as "Transeurasian") and on the other hand to various Southeast Asian language s, especially to Austronesian. None of these proposals have gained wide acceptance and the Altaic language family itself is now considered controversial.^[32][13][34]

Other theories view the Japanese language as an early creole language formed through inputs from at least two distinct language groups or as a distinct language of its own that has absorbed various aspects from neighbouring languages.^[35][36][37]

For now, Japanese is classificated as member of the Japonic languages or as a language isolate with no known living relatives if Ryukyuan is counted as dialects.^[38]

Phonology

Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English.

Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect.

Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end.

Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb.

There are three types of adjectives (see Japanese adjectives):

Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs.

The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include for example:

It is also used for the lative case, indicating a motion to a location.

• o for the accusative case.

• wa for the topic. It can co-exist with the case markers listed above, and it overrides ga and (in most cases) o.

Note: The subtle difference between wa and ga in Japanese cannot be derived from the English language as such, because the distinction between sentence topic and subject is not made there. While wa indicates the topic, which the rest of the sentence describes or acts upon, it carries the implication that the subject indicated by wa is not unique, or may be part of a larger group.

Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.

The Japanese language can express differing levels in social status.

Whereas teineigo (丁寧語) (polite language) is commonly an inflectional system, sonkeigo (尊敬語) (respectful language) and kenjōgo (謙譲語) (humble language) often employ many special honorific and humble alternate verbs: iku "go" becomes ikimasu in polite form, but is replaced by irassharu in honorific speech and ukagau or mairu in humble speech.

The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language.

Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o- or go- as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a polite speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu in order to show politeness.

Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity.

Vocabulary

There are three main sources of words in the Japanese language, the yamato kotoba (大和言葉) or wago (和語), kango (漢語), and gairaigo (外来語).^[41]

The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called yamato kotoba (大和言葉 or infrequently 大和詞, i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wago (和語 or rarely 倭語, i.e. the "Wa language"). In addition to words from this original language, present-day Japanese includes a number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots following Chinese patterns. These words, known as kango (漢語), entered the language from the 5th century onwards via contact with Chinese culture. According to the Shinsen Kokugo Jiten (新選国語辞典) Japanese dictionary, kango comprise 49.1% of the total vocabulary, wago make up 33.8%, other foreign words or gairaigo (外来語) account for 8.8%, and the remaining 8.3% constitute hybridized words or konshugo (混種語) that draw elements from more than one language.^[42]

There are also a great number of words of mimetic origin in Japanese, with Japanese having a rich collection of sound symbolism, both onomatopoeia for physical sounds, and more abstract words. A small number of words have come into Japanese from the Ainu language. Tonakai (reindeer), rakko (sea otter) and shishamo (smelt, a type of fish) are well-known examples of words of Ainu origin.

Words of different origins occupy different registers in Japanese. Like Latin-derived words in English, kango words are typically perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.

Incorporating vocabulary from European languages, gairaigo, began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by words from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French, and English. Today most borrowings are from English.

In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate European concepts; these are known as wasei kango (Japanese-made Chinese words). Many of these were then imported into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, seiji 政治 ("politics"), and kagaku 化学 ("chemistry") are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greek- and Latin-derived words – both inherited or borrowed into European languages, or modern coinages from Greek or Latin roots – are shared among modern European languages – see classical compound.

In the past few decades, wasei-eigo ("made-in-Japan English") has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as wanpatān ワンパターン (< one + pattern, "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and sukinshippu スキンシップ (< skin + -ship, "physical contact"), although coined by compounding English roots, are nonsensical in most non-Japanese contexts; exceptions exist in nearby languages such as Korean however, which often use words such as skinship and rimokon (remote control) in the same way as in Japanese.

The popularity of many Japanese cultural exports has made some native Japanese words familiar in English, including (from 人力車 jinrikisha),. See list of English words of Japanese origin for more.

Writing system

Literacy was introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, by way of Baekje before the 5th century.^[43] Using this language, the Japanese king Bu presented a petition to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in AD 478.^[1] After the ruin of Baekje, Japan invited scholars from China to learn more of the Chinese writing system. Japanese emperors gave an official rank to Chinese scholars (続守言/薩弘格/^[2][3] 袁晋卿^[4]) and spread the use of Chinese characters from the 7th century to the 8th century.

At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, with Japanese names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds. Later, during the 7th century AD, the Chinese-sounding phoneme principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose, but some Japanese words were still written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. This is when the history of Japanese as a written language begins in its own right. By this time, the Japanese language was already very distinct from the Ryukyuan languages.^[44]

An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in AD 712. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech syllable by syllable.

Over time, a writing system evolved.

Hiragana and Katakana were first simplified from Kanji, and Hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century,^[48] was mainly used by women.

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin script (or romaji in Japanese) is used to a certain extent, such as for imported acronyms and to transcribe Japanese names and in other instances where non-Japanese speakers need to know how to pronounce a word (such as "ramen" at a restaurant). Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as 統一 tōitsu ("unification").

Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War.

Japanese students begin to learn kanji from their first year at elementary school.

As for kanji for personal names, the circumstances are somewhat complicated.

Hiragana are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji, and also following kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs (and adjectives) in Japanese are conjugated, kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing their meaning. For this reason, hiragana are appended to kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. Hiragana used in this way are called okurigana. Hiragana can also be written in a superscript called furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading. This is done to facilitate learning, as well as to clarify particularly old or obscure (or sometimes invented) readings.

Katakana, like hiragana, constitute a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. For example, "Australia" has been adapted as Ōsutoraria (オーストラリア), and "supermarket" has been adapted and shortened into sūpā (スーパー).

Study by non-native speakers

Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language.

International interest in the Japanese language dates from the 19th century but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese popular culture (such as anime and video games) since the 1990s. As of 2015, more than 3.6 million people studied the language worldwide, primarily in East and Southeast Asia.^[51] Nearly 1 million Chinese, 745,000 Indonesians, 556,000 South Koreans and 357,000 Australians studied Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions.^[51] Between 2012 and 2015, considerable growth of learners originated in Australia (20.5%), Thailand (34.1%), Vietnam (38.7%) and the Philippines (54.4%).^[51]

As of 2017, more than 267,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 107,260 Chinese, 61,670 Vietnamese and 21,500 Nepalese.^[52] In addition, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including Japanese Brazilians and foreigners married to Japanese nationals. In the United Kingdom, study of the Japanese language is supported by the British Association for Japanese Studies. In Ireland, Japanese is offered as a language in the Leaving Certificate in some schools.^[53]

The Japanese government provides standardized tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), which features five levels of exams (changed from four levels in 2010), ranging from elementary (N5) to advanced (N1). The JLPT is offered twice a year. The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the Business Japanese Proficiency Test which tests the learner's ability to understand Japanese in a business setting. The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, which took over the BJT from JETRO in 2009, announced in August 2010 that the test would be discontinued in 2011 due to financial pressures on the Foundation. However, it has since issued a statement to the effect that the test will continue to be available as a result of support from the Japanese government.^[54][55]

See also

• Aizuchi
• Culture of Japan
• Japanese dictionaries
• Japanese exonyms
• Japanese language and computers
• Japanese literature
• Japanese name
• Japanese orthography issues
• Japanese Sign Language family
• Japanese words and words derived from Japanese in other languages at Wiktionary, Wikipedia's sibling project
• Classical Japanese language
• Romanization of Japanese Hepburn romanization
• Shogakukan Progressive Japanese–English Dictionary
• Rendaku
• Yojijukugo

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