Japanese grammar

is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch accent|pitch-accent]. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. 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 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.
In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages.

Distinctive aspects of modern Japanese sentence structure

Word order: head-final and left-branching

The modern theory of constituent order, usually attributed to Joseph Harold Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrases. Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier or follows it. Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are:

genitive phrase, i.e., noun modified by another noun ;
noun governed by an adposition ;
comparison.
noun modified by an adjective.

Some languages are inconsistent in constituent order, having a mixture of head-initial phrase types and head-final phrase types. Looking at the preceding list, English for example is mostly head-initial, but nouns follow the adjectives which modify them. Moreover, genitive phrases can be either head-initial or head-final in English. By contrast, the Japanese language is consistently head-final:

genitive phrase:
noun governed by an adposition:
comparison:
noun modified by an adjective:

Head-finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the building of sentences using other sentences. In sentences that have other sentences as constituents, the subordinated sentences, always precede what they refer to, since they are modifiers and what they modify has the syntactic status of phrasal head. Translating the phrase "the man who was walking down the street" into Japanese word order would be "street down walking was man".
Head-finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. In the world's languages, it is common to avoid repetition between coordinated clauses by optionally deleting a constituent common to the two parts, as in "Bob bought his mother some flowers and his father a tie", where the second bought is omitted. In Japanese, such "gapping" must proceed in the reverse order: "Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought". The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences always end in a verb —the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as,, and. The particle turns a statement into a question, while the others express the speaker's attitude towards the statement.

Word class system

Japanese has five major lexical word classes:

nouns
verbal nouns
Adjectival noun
verbs
Japanese adjectives

More broadly, there are two classes: uninflectable and inflectable. To be precise, a verbal noun is simply a noun to which the light verb can be appended, while an adjectival noun is like a noun but uses instead of when acting attributively. Adjectives inflect identically to the negative form of verbs, which end in. Compare → and →.
Some scholars, such as Eleanor Harz Jorden, refer to adjectives instead as adjectivals, since they are grammatically distinct from adjectives: they can predicate a sentence. That is, is glossed as "hot" when modifying a noun phrase, as in, but as "is hot" when predicating, as in.

Open and closed classes

The two inflected classes, verb and adjective, are historically considered closed classes, meaning they do not readily gain new members—but see the following paragraphs. Instead, new and borrowed verbs and adjectives are typically conjugated periphrastically as verbal noun + and adjectival noun +. This differs from Indo-European languages, where verbs and adjectives are open classes, though analogous "do" constructions exist, including English "do a favor", "do the twist" or French "faire un footing", and periphrastic constructions are common for other senses, like "try climbing" or "try parkour". Other languages where verbs are a closed class include Basque: very few Basque verbs have synthetic conjugation, all the others are only formed periphrastically. Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages.
In a few cases historically, and much more commonly recently, new verbs are created by appending the suffix to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is most often, but not exclusively, done with borrowed words, and results in a word written in a mixture of katakana and hiragana, which is otherwise very rare. This is typically casual, with the most well-established example being , from, with other common examples including, from memo, and from. In cases where the borrowed word already ends with or even contains a or, this may be rebracketed as a verb ending and changed to a, as in, from ;, from ; and, from. New verbs coined in this fashion are uniformly group 1 verbs and, at least in the Tokyo accent, consistently are stressed immediately before the final る.
New adjectives are extremely rare; one example is, from adjectival noun, and a more casual recent example is, by contraction of. By contrast, in Old Japanese adjectives were open, as reflected in words like, from the adjective, and, from the noun . Japanese adjectives are unusual in being closed class but quite numerous – about 700 adjectives – while most languages with closed class adjectives have very few. Some believe this is due to a grammatical change of inflection from an aspect system to a tense system, with adjectives predating the change.
The conjugation of -adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb.
Japanese vocabulary has a large layer of Chinese loanwords, nearly all of which go back more than one thousand years, yet virtually none of them are verbs or "-adjectives" – they are all nouns, of which some are verbal nouns and some are adjectival nouns. In addition to the basic verbal noun + form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → →, as in, and some cases where the stem underwent sound change, as in, from.
Verbal nouns are uncontroversially nouns, having only minor syntactic differences to distinguish them from pure nouns like 'mountain'. There are some minor distinctions within verbal nouns, most notably that some primarily conjugate as , more like nouns, while others primarily conjugate as, and others are common either way. For example, is much more common than, while is much more common than. Adjectival nouns have more syntactic differences versus pure nouns, and traditionally were considered more separate, but they, too, are ultimately a subcategory of nouns.
There are a few minor word classes that are related to adjectival nouns, namely the adjectives and adjectives. Of these, adjectives are fossils of earlier forms of adjectives, and are typically classed separately, while adjectives are a parallel class, but are typically classed with adjectives.

Different classifications

The first structured description of the Japanese parts of speech was in, an 1831 grammar by Tsurumine Shigenobu. It was based on earlier Dutch grammars such as Shizuki Tadao's and. The words hinshi and shihin also came about from these early late-Edo and early-Meiji grammars. Since then, there have been multiple conflicting classifications of the parts of speech of Japanese.
The term assumed different meanings, such as a verb form that precedes a noun, or as a proposed alternative to, because Japanese "adjectives" are verb-like in nature, unlike European adjectives. As shown in the table, Matsushita Daizaburō used keiyōshi explicitly for the Eurocentric idea of adjectives as words that precede nouns, while reserving keiyō dōshi for Japanese "adjectives" as verb-like words. Ochiai Naobumi defined keiyō dōshi not as a grammatical category, but as a semantic one with meanings similar to those of stative verbs. It was not until Haga Yaichi's usage in 1905 that keiyō dōshi came to be refer to adjectival words whose ended with or .
The of today has followed Iwabuchi Etsutarō's model outlined in his 1943 grammar,, compiled for the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture. It recognizes 10 parts of speech as shown in the table.
Among historical classifications, the grammarian Matsushita Daizaburō notably compared his own terminology to the terminologies translated from and modeled after European ones at the time. In particular, he rejected the equation of what were dubbed in Japanese to the concept of "adjectives" in European grammars, although he revised his systems over the years, which ended up conforming to the popular usage of the term keiyōshi. According to Matsushita :
The distinction between Japanese so-called "adjectives" and European true adjectives reflect in how differently they inflect. European adjectives are a type of nouns, that is, words that decline and express case, gender and number, and that include substantive nouns, adjective nouns, numeral nouns and pronouns. Japanese "adjectives", on the other hand, do not decline, but conjugate and express tense, mood, aspect, evidentiality, etc., and thus are more similar to European verbs.

Japanese as a topic-prominent language

In discourse pragmatics, the term topic refers to what a section of discourse is about. At the beginning of a section of discourse, the topic is usually unknown, in which case it is usually necessary to explicitly mention it. As the discourse carries on, the topic need not be the grammatical subject of each new sentence.
Starting with Middle Japanese, the grammar evolved so as to explicitly distinguish topics from nontopics. This is done by two distinct particles. Consider the following pair of sentences:
In the first sentence the dog is not a discourse topic—not yet; in the second sentence it is a discourse topic. In linguistics a sentence such as the second one is termed a presentational sentence because its function in the discourse is to present dog as a topic, to "broach it for discussion". Once a referent has been established as the topic of the current monolog or dialog, then in modern Japanese its marking will change from to.
To better explain the difference, the first sentence can be translated to "There's a dog eating a sandwich", while the second sentence can be translated to "Speaking of the dog, it's eating a sandwich"; these renderings reflect a discourse fragment in which "the dog" is being established as the topic of an extended discussion. The first sentence answers the question "What is going on?," whereas the second sentence answers the question "What is the dog doing?"

Liberal omission of the subject of a sentence

The grammatical subject is commonly omitted in Japanese, as in
Subjects are mentioned when a topic is introduced, or in situations where an ambiguity might result from their omission. The preceding example sentence would most likely be uttered in the middle of a discourse, where who it is that "went to Japan" will be clear from what has already been said.

Sentences, phrases and words

Text is composed of Sentence, which are in turn composed of phrases, which are its smallest coherent components. Like Chinese and classical Korean, written Japanese does not typically demarcate words with spaces; its agglutinative nature further makes the concept of a word rather different from words in English. The reader identifies word divisions by semantic cues and a knowledge of phrase structure. Phrases have a single meaning-bearing word, followed by a string of suffixes, auxiliary verbs and particles to modify its meaning and designate its grammatical role.
Some scholars romanize Japanese sentences by inserting spaces only at phrase boundaries, treating an entire phrase as a single word. This represents an almost purely phonological conception of where one word ends and the next begins. There is some validity in taking this approach: phonologically, the postpositional particles merge with the structural word that precedes them, and within a phonological phrase, the pitch can have at most one fall. Usually, however, grammarians adopt a more conventional concept of word'', one which invokes meaning and sentence structure.

Phrasal movement

In Japanese, phrasal constituents can be moved to the beginning or the end of the sentence. Leftward movement of a phrasal constituent is referred to as "scrambling".

Word classification

In linguistics generally, words and affixes are often classified into two major word categories: lexical words, those that refer to the world outside of a discourse, and function words—also including fragments of words—which help to build the sentence in accordance with the grammar rules of the language. Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and sometimes prepositions and postpositions, while grammatical words or word parts include everything else. The native tradition in Japanese grammar scholarship seems to concur in this view of classification. This native Japanese tradition uses the terminology, for words having lexical meaning, and, for words having a grammatical function.
Classical Japanese had some auxiliary verbs which have become grammaticized in modern Japanese as inflectional suffixes, such as the past tense suffix .
Traditional scholarship proposes a system of word classes differing somewhat from the above-mentioned. The "independent" words have the following categories.
Ancillary words also divide into a nonconjugable class, containing grammatical particles and Japanese counter word, and a conjugable class consisting of auxiliary verbs. There is not wide agreement among linguists as to the English translations of the above terms.

Controversy over the characterization of adjectival nouns

Uehara observes that Japanese grammarians have disagreed as to the criteria that make some words inflectional and others not, in particular, the adjectival nouns – or -adjectives. The claim that adjectival nouns are inflectional rests on the claim that the element, regarded as a copula by proponents of non-inflectional adjectival nouns, is really a suffix—an inflection. That is, is a one-word sentence, not a two-word sentence,. However, numerous constructions show that is less bound to the roots of nouns and adjectival nouns than and are to the roots of -adjectives and verbs, respectively.
On the basis of such constructions, Uehara finds that the copula is not suffixal and that adjectival nouns pattern with nouns in being non-inflectional.
Similarly, Eleanor Jorden considers this class of words a kind of nominal, not adjective, and refers to them as -nominals in her textbook Japanese: The Spoken Language.

Nouns

Japanese has no grammatical gender, number, or articles; though the demonstrative, is often translatable as "the". Thus, linguists agree that Japanese nouns are noninflecting: can be translated as "cat", "cats", "a cat", "the cat", "some cats" and so forth, depending on context. However, as part of the extensive pair of grammatical systems that Japanese possesses for honorification and politeness, nouns too can be modified. Nouns take politeness prefixes : for native nouns, and for Sino-Japanese nouns. A few examples are given in the following table. In a few cases, there is suppletion, as with the first of the examples given below, '飯'.

meaning	plain	respectful
meal
money
body
word

Lacking grammatical number, Japanese does not differentiate between count and mass nouns. A small number of nouns have collectives formed by reduplication ; for example: and. Reduplication is not productive. Words in Japanese referring to more than one of something are collectives, not plurals., for example, means "a lot of people" or "people in general"; it is never used to mean "two people". A phrase like would be taken to mean "the people of Edo", or "the population of Edo", not "two people from Edo" or even "a few people from Edo". Similarly, means "multiple mountains".
A limited number of nouns have collective forms that refer to groups of people. Examples include ; ;. One uncommon personal noun,, has a much more common reduplicative collective form:.
The suffixes and are by far the most common collectivizing suffixes. These are, again, not pluralizing suffixes: does not mean "some number of people named Taro", but instead indicates the group including Taro. Depending on context, might be translated into "Taro and his friends", "Taro and his siblings", "Taro and his family", or any other logical grouping that has Taro as the representative. Some words with collectives have become fixed phrases and refer to one person. Specifically, and can be singular, even though and were originally collectivizing in these words; to unambiguously refer to groups of them, an additional collectivizing suffix is added: and, though is somewhat uncommon. is sometimes applied to inanimate objects, and, for example, but this usage is colloquial and indicates a high level of anthropomorphisation and childlikeness, and is proscribed and not broadly accepted as standard.

Grammatical case

s in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:

Nominative – for subject, for the topic
Genitive –
Dative –
Accusative –
Lative –, used for destination direction
Ablative –, used for source direction
Instrumental/Locative –
Pronouns

person	very informal	plain, informal	polite
first
second
third

Although many grammars and textbooks mention pronouns, Japanese lacks true pronouns. Strictly speaking, pronouns cannot take adjectives or other certain parts of speech as modifiers, but Japanese can. For example, is grammatical in Japanese. Also, unlike true pronouns, Japanese are not a closed class; new are commonly introduced, and old ones go out of use relatively quickly.
A large number of referring to people are translated as pronouns in their most common uses. Examples: ; ; ; see also the adjoining table or a longer list. Some of these "personal nouns" such as, or, also have second-person uses: in second-person is an extremely rude "you", and in second-person is a diminutive "you" used for young boys. and also mean "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" respectively, and this usage of the words is possibly more common than the use as pronouns.
Like other subjects, personal are seldom used and are de-emphasized in Japanese. This is partly because Japanese sentences do not always require explicit subjects, and partly because names or titles are often used where pronouns would appear in a translation:
The possible referents of are sometimes constrained depending on the order of occurrence. The following pair of examples from Bart Mathias illustrates one such constraint.

Reflexive pronouns

English has a reflexive form of each personal pronoun ; Japanese, in contrast, has one main reflexive, namely, which can also mean 'I'. The uses of the reflexive nouns in the two languages are very different, as demonstrated by the following literal translations :

example	reason
	the target of must be animate
	there is no ambiguity in this translation, as explained below
Either "Makoto expects that Shizuko will take good care of him", or "Makoto expects that Shizuko will take good care of herself."	can be in a different sentence or dependent clause, but its target is ambiguous

If the sentence has more than one grammatical or semantic subject, then the target of is the subject of the primary or most prominent action; thus in the following sentence refers unambiguously to Shizuko because the primary action is Shizuko's reading.
In practice the main action is not always discernible, in which case such sentences are ambiguous. The use of in complex sentences follows non-trivial rules.
There are also equivalents to such as. Other uses of the reflexive pronoun in English are covered by adverbs like which is used in the sense of "by oneself". For example,
Change in a verb's valency is not accomplished by use of reflexive pronouns. Instead, separate intransitive verbs and transitive verbs are used. In modern Japanese, there is no longer any productive morphology to derive new transitive verbs from intransitive ones, or vice versa.

Demonstratives


	this one	that one	that one over there	which one?
	this	that	that over there	what?
	like this	like that	like that over there	what sort of?
	here	there	¹over there	where?
	this way	that way	that way over there	which way?
³	in this manner	in that manner	¹in that manner	how? in what manner?
	this person	that person	that person	who?

irregular formation
colloquially contracted to -cchi
is represented by

Demonstratives occur in the,, and series. The series refers to things closer to the speaker than the hearer, the series for things closer to the hearer, and the series for things distant to both the speaker and the hearer. With, demonstratives turn into the corresponding interrogative form. Demonstratives can also be used to refer to people, for example
Demonstratives limit, and therefore precede, nouns; thus for "this/my book", and for "that/your book".
When demonstratives are used to refer to things not visible to the speaker or the hearer, or to concepts, they fulfill a related but different anaphoric role. The anaphoric distals are used for shared information between the speaker and the listener.
instead of would imply that B does not share this knowledge about Sapporo, which is inconsistent with the meaning of the sentence. The anaphoric medials are used to refer to experience or knowledge that is not shared between the speaker and listener.
Again, is inappropriate here because Sato does not know Tanaka personally. The proximal demonstratives do not have clear anaphoric uses. They can be used in situations where the distal series sound too disconnected:

Conjugable words

Stem forms

Conjugative suffixes and auxiliary verbs are attached to the stem forms of the affixee. In modern Japanese, there are six stem forms, ordered following from the endings that these forms have in 5-row verbs, where terminal and attributive forms are the same for verbs, but differ for nominals, notably -nominals.
; Irrealis form : is used for plain negative, causative and passive constructions. The most common use of this form is with the auxiliary that turns verbs into their negative form. The version is used for volitional expression and formed by a euphonic change.
; Continuative form : is used in a linking role. This is the most productive [|stem form], taking on a variety of endings and auxiliaries, and can even occur independently in a sense similar to the ending. This form is also used to negate adjectives.
; Terminal form : is used at the ends of clauses in predicate positions. This form is also variously known as plain form or dictionary form – it is the form that verbs are listed under in a dictionary.
; Attributive verb#Japanese : is prefixed to nominals and is used to define or classify the noun, similar to a relative clause in English. In modern Japanese it is practically identical to the terminal form, except that verbs are generally not inflected for politeness; in old Japanese these forms differed. Further, -nominals behave differently in terminal and attributive positions; see Adjectival verbs and nouns, below.
; Hypothetical form : is used for conditional and subjunctive forms, using the ending.
; Imperative form'' : is used to turn verbs into commands. Adjectives do not have an imperative stem form.
The application of conjugative suffixes to stem forms follow certain euphonic principles.

Verbs

Verbs in Japanese are rigidly constrained to the end of a clause. This means that the predicate position is always located at the end of a sentence.
The subject and objects of the verb are indicated by means of particles, and the grammatical functions of the verb are indicated by means of conjugation. When the subject and the dissertative topic coincide, the subject is often omitted; if the verb is intransitive, the entire sentence may consist of a single verb. Verbs have two tenses indicated by conjugation, past and non-past. The semantic difference between present and future is not indicated by means of conjugation. Usually there is no ambiguity as context makes it clear whether the speaker is referring to the present or future. Voice and aspect are also indicated by means of conjugation, and possibly agglutinating auxiliary verbs. For example, the continuative aspect is formed by means of the continuative conjugation known as the gerundive or form, and the auxiliary verb ; to illustrate, →.
Verbs can be semantically classified based on certain conjugations.
; Stative verbs: indicate existential properties, such as "to be", "to be able to do", "to need", etc. These verbs generally do not have a continuative conjugation with because they are semantically continuative already.
; Continual verbs: conjugate with the auxiliary to indicate the progressive aspect. Examples: "to eat", "to drink", "to think". To illustrate the conjugation, →.
; Punctual verbs: conjugate with to indicate a repeated action, or a continuing state after some action. Example: → ; →.
; Non-volitional verb: indicate uncontrollable action or emotion. These verbs generally have no volitional, imperative or potential conjugation. Examples:,.
; Movement verbs: indicate motion. Examples:,. In the continuative form they take the particle to indicate a purpose.
There are other possible classes, and a large amount of overlap between the classes.
Lexically, nearly every verb in Japanese is a member of exactly one of the following three regular conjugation groups.
; Group 2a: verbs with a stem ending in. The terminal stem form always rhymes with. Examples:,.
; Group 2b: verbs with a stem ending in. The terminal stem form always rhymes with. Examples:,.
; Group 1: verbs with a stem ending in a consonant. When this is and the verb ends in, it is not apparent from the terminal form whether the verb is Group 1 or Group 2b, e.g.. If the stem ends in, that consonant sound only appears in before the final of the irrealis form.
The "row" in the above classification means a row in the gojūon table. "Upper 1-row" means the row that is one row above the center row i.e. i-row. "Lower 1-row" means the row that is one row below the center row i.e. -row. "5-row" means the conjugation runs through all 5 rows of the gojūon table. A conjugation is fully described by identifying both the row and the column in the gojūon table. For example, belongs to, belongs to, and belongs to.
One should avoid confusing verbs in with verbs in or. For example, belongs to, whereas its homophone belongs to. Likewise, belongs to, whereas its homophone belongs to.
Historically, Classical Japanese had upper and lower 1-row groups, upper and lower 2-row groups and a 4-row group. The verbs became most of the verbs in modern Japanese. The group was reclassified as the group during the post-WWII writing reform in 1946, to write Japanese as it is pronounced. Since verbs have migrated across groups in the history of the language, the conjugation of classical verbs cannot be ascertained from knowledge of modern Japanese alone.
Of the irregular classes, there are two:
; -group: which has only one member,. In Japanese grammars these words are classified as, an abbreviation of, sa-row irregular conjugation).
; -group: which also has one member,. The Japanese name for this class is or simply.
Classical Japanese had two further irregular classes, the -group, which contained and, the -group, which included such verbs as, the equivalent of modern, as well as quite a number of extremely irregular verbs that cannot be classified.
The following table illustrates the stem forms of the above conjugation groups, with the root indicated with dots. For example, to find the hypothetical form of the group 1 verb, look in the second row to find its root,, then in the hypothetical row to get the ending, giving the stem form. When there are multiple possibilities, they are listed in the order of increasing rarity.

The and irrealis forms for Group 1 verbs were historically one, but since the post-WWII spelling reforms they have been written differently. In modern Japanese the form is used only for the volitional mood and the form is used in all other cases; see also the conjugation table below.
The unexpected ending is due to the verb's root being but only being pronounced before in modern Japanese.

The above are only the stem forms of the verbs; to these one must add various verb endings in order to get the fully conjugated verb. The following table lists the most common conjugations. Note that in some cases the form is different depending on the conjugation group of the verb. See Japanese verb conjugations for a full list.

This is an entirely different verb; has no potential form.
These forms change depending on the final syllable of the verb's dictionary form. For details, see Euphonic changes, below, and the article Japanese verb conjugation.

The polite ending conjugates as a group 1 verb, except that the negative imperfective and perfective forms are and respectively, and certain conjugations are in practice rarely if ever used. The passive and potential endings and, and the causative endings and all conjugate as group 2b verbs. Multiple verbal endings can therefore agglutinate. For example, a common formation is the causative-passive ending:.
As should be expected, the vast majority of theoretically possible combinations of conjugative endings are not semantically meaningful.

Transitive and intransitive verbs

Japanese has a large variety of related pairs of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs, such as the transitive, and the intransitive.

transitive verb	intransitive verb
One thing acts out the transitive verb on another Usually uses to link to the direct object	The intransitive verb passively happens without direct intervention. Usually uses or to link subject and verb.

Note: Some intransitive verbs take what looks like a direct object, but is not. For example, :

Adjectival verbs and nouns

Semantically speaking, words that denote attributes or properties are primarily distributed between two morphological classes :

adjectival verbs– these have roots and conjugating stem forms, and are semantically and morphologically similar to stative verbs.
adjectival nouns– these are nouns that combine with the copula.

Unlike adjectives in languages like English, -adjectives in Japanese inflect for aspect and mood, like verbs. Japanese adjectives do not have comparative or superlative inflections; comparatives and superlatives have to be marked periphrastically using adverbs like and.
Every adjective in Japanese can be used in an attributive position, and nearly every Japanese adjective can be used in a predicative position. There are a few Japanese adjectives that cannot predicate, known as, which are derived from other word classes; examples include,, and which are all stylistic -type variants of normal -type adjectives. Some examples not based on are,,, and.
All -adjectives except for have regular conjugations, and is irregular only in the fact that it is a changed form of the regular adjective permissible in the terminal and attributive forms. For all other forms it reverts to.

	-adjectives	-adjectives

Irrealis form
Continuative form
Terminal form¹
Attributive form¹		/
Hypothetical form
Imperative form²

The attributive and terminal forms were formerly and, respectively; in modern Japanese these are used productively for stylistic reasons only, although many set phrases such as and, derive from them.
The imperative form is extremely rare in modern Japanese, restricted to set patterns like, where they are treated as adverbial phrases. It is impossible for an imperative form to be in a predicate position.

Common conjugations of adjectives are enumerated below. is not treated separately, because all conjugation forms are identical to those of.

Note that these are just forms of the -type adjective
Since most adjectives describe non-volitional conditions, the volitional form is interpreted as "it is possible", if sensible. In some rare cases it is semi-volitional: in response to a report or request.

Adjectives too are governed by euphonic rules in certain cases, as noted in the section on it below. For the polite negatives of -type adjectives, see also the section below on the copula.

Copula ( )

The copula behaves very much like a verb or an adjective in terms of conjugation.

Irrealis form
Continuative form
Terminal form
Attributive form
Hypothetical form
Imperative form

Note that there are no potential, causative, or passive forms of the copula, just as with adjectives.
The following are some examples.
In continuative conjugations, is often contracted in speech to ; for some kinds of informal speech is preferable to, or is the only possibility.

nonpast	informal		-
nonpast	polite		-
nonpast	respectful		-
past	informal	cont. +	-
past	polite		-
past	respectful		-
negative nonpast	informal	cont. +
negative nonpast	polite	cont. +
negative nonpast	respectful	cont. +
negative past	informal	cont. +
negative past	polite	cont. +
negative past	respectful	cont. +
conditional	informal	hyp. +	-
conditional	polite	cont. +	-
conditional	respectful	cont. +	-
provisional	informal		-
provisional	polite	same as conditional	-
provisional	respectful	same as conditional	-
volitional	informal		-
volitional	polite		-
volitional	respectful		-
adverbial and forms	informal	cont.	-
adverbial and forms	polite	cont. +	-
adverbial and forms	respectful	cont. +	-

Historical sound change

Archaic	Modern

	¹




auxiliary verb
medial or final
medial or final,,	,,
any,,	,, ¹

Usually not reflected in spelling

Modern pronunciation is a result of a long history of phonemic drift that can be traced back to written records of the 13th century, and possibly earlier. However, it was only in 1946 that the Japanese ministry of education modified existing kana usage to conform to the standard dialect. All earlier texts used the archaic orthography, now referred to as historical [kana usage]. The adjoining table is a nearly exhaustive list of these spelling changes.
Note that the palatalized morae ゆ and よ combine with the initial consonant yielding a palatalized syllable. The most basic example of this is modern, which historically developed as →, via the → rule.
A few sound changes are not reflected in the spelling. Firstly, merged with, both being pronounced as a long. Secondly, the particles は and を are still written using historical kana usage, though these are pronounced as and respectively, rather than and.
For example, the modern reading arose from the historical. The latter was pronounced something like by the Japanese at the time it was borrowed. However, a modern reader of a classical text would still read this as, the modern pronunciation.

Verb conjugations

Conjugations of some verbs and adjectives differ from the prescribed formation rules because of euphonic changes. Nearly all of these euphonic changes are themselves regular. For verbs the exceptions are all in the ending of the continuative form of group when the following particle or auxiliary is derived from the ancient perfective auxiliary -tsu, including -te, -te ari → -tari → -ta. This is not the case with the unrelated desiderative auxiliaries -tashi → -tai and -tagaru, however.

Continuative ending	Changes to	Example
, or	っ	→ → →
, or	syllabic , with the following sound voiced	→ → →
		→
	, with the following sound voiced	→

* denotes impossible/ungrammatical form.
There is one other irregular change:, for which there is an exceptional continuative form: + →, + →, etc. The more literary and/or dialectal variant is regular, hence. Older forms such as iite and ite have been recorded in 16th-century Christian publications.
For verbs like,, etc., there is a clear preference for sokuonbin in northern and eastern dialects, as in, ; and for u-onbin in western and southern dialects, as in,. In standard Japanese, however, there are three exceptions where u-onbin is preferred,, and. For these verbs, sokuonbin is rare, but not nonexistent, such as /, / and. Forms such as,,,, have been reported as well.

Polite forms of adjectives

The continuative form of proper adjectives, when followed by polite forms such as or, undergoes a transformation; this may be followed by historical sound changes, yielding a one-step or two-step sound change. Note that these verbs are almost invariably conjugated to polite form, as and , and that these verbs are preceded by the continuative form – – of adjectives, rather than the terminal form – – which is used before the more everyday.
The rule is → , possibly also combining with the previous syllable according to the spelling reform chart, which may also undergo palatalization in the case of.
Historically there were two classes of proper Old Japanese adjectives, and . This distinction collapsed during the evolution of [Late Middle Japanese#Adjectives|Late Middle Japanese adjectives], and both are now considered adjectives. The sound change for adjectives follows the same rule as for other adjectives, notably that the preceding vowel also changes and the preceding mora undergoes palatalization, yielding →, though historically this was considered a separate but parallel rule.

Continuative ending	Changes to	Example
		→
		→
		→

		→
		→

Respectful verbs

Respectful verbs such as,,,,, etc. behave like group 1 verbs, except in the continuative and imperative forms.

	Change	Example
continuative	changed to	→ →
imperative	changed to	→ →

Colloquial contractions

In speech, common combinations of conjugation and auxiliary verbs are contracted in a fairly regular manner.

Full form	Colloquial	Example
	group 1
	group 1


	group 2b
	group 1
	group 1
	group 2a

There are occasional others, such as → as in → and → – these are considered quite casual and are more common among the younger generation.
Contractions differ by dialect, but behave similarly to the standard ones given above. For example, in the Kansai dialect, →.

Other independent words

Adverbs

Adverbs in Japanese are not as tightly integrated into the morphology as in many other languages; adverbs are not an independent class of words, but the role of an adverb is played by other words. For example, every adjective in the continuative form can be used as an adverb; thus, →. The primary distinguishing characteristic of adverbs is that they cannot occur in a predicate position, just as it is in English. The following classification of adverbs is not intended to be authoritative or exhaustive.
; Verbal adverbs: verbs in the continuative form with the particle. E.g. →, used for instance as:.
; Adjectival adverbs: adjectives in the continuative form, as mentioned above. Example: →
; Nominal adverbs: grammatical nouns that function as adverbs. Example:.
; Sound symbolism: words that mimic sounds or concepts. Examples:,,, etc.
Often, especially for sound symbolism, the particle is used. See the article on Japanese sound symbolism.

Conjunctions and interjections

Although called "conjunctions", conjunctions in Japanese are – as their English translations show – actually a kind of adverb:
Examples of conjunctions:,, etc.
Interjections in Japanese differ little in use and translation from interjections in English:
Examples of interjections:,,,, etc.

Ancillary words

Particles

Particles in Japanese are postpositional, as they immediately follow the modified component. Both the pronunciation and spelling differs for the particles, and, and are romanized according to pronunciation rather than spelling. Only a few prominent particles are listed here.

Topic, theme, and subject: and

The complex distinction between the so-called topic,, and subject,, particles can often be confusing for second-language learners and students of Japanese. The clause is well known for appearing to contain two subjects. It does not simply mean "the elephant's nose is long", as that can be translated as. Rather, a more literal translation would be " the elephant, its nose is long"; furthermore, as Japanese does not distinguish between singular and plural the way English does, it could also mean "as for elephants, their noses are long".
Two major scholarly surveys of Japanese linguistics in English, clarify the distinction. To simplify matters, the referents of and in this section are called the topic and subject respectively, with the understanding that if either is absent, the grammatical topic and subject may coincide.
As an abstract and rough approximation, the difference between and is a matter of focus: gives focus to the action of the sentence, i.e., to the verb or adjective, whereas gives focus to the subject of the action. However, when first being introduced to the topic and subject markers and, most are told that the difference between the two is simpler. The topic marker,, is used to declare or to make a statement. The subject marker,, is used for new information, or asking for new information.

Thematic

The use of to introduce a new theme of discourse is directly linked to the notion of grammatical theme. Opinions differ on the structure of discourse theme, though it seems fairly uncontroversial to imagine a first-in-first-out hierarchy of themes that is threaded through the discourse. However, the usage of this understanding of themes can be limiting when speaking of their scope and depth, and the introduction of later themes may cause earlier themes to expire. In these sorts of sentences, the steadfast translation into English uses constructs like "speaking of X" or "on the topic of X", though such translations tend to be bulky as they fail to use the thematic mechanisms of English. For lack of a comprehensive strategy, many teachers of Japanese emphasize the "speaking of X" pattern without sufficient warning.
A common linguistic joke shows the insufficiency of rote translation with the sentence, which per the pattern would translate as "I am an eel". Yet, in a restaurant this sentence can reasonably be used to say "My order is eel", with no intended humour. This is because the sentence should be literally read, "As for me, it is an eel," with "it" referring to the speaker's order. The topic of the sentence is clearly not its subject.

Contrastive

Related to the role of in introducing themes is its use in contrasting the current topic and its aspects from other possible topics and their aspects. The suggestive pattern is "X, but…" or "as for X, …".
Because of its contrastive nature, the topic cannot be undefined.
In this use, is required.
In practice, the distinction between thematic and contrastive is not that useful. There can be at most one thematic in a sentence, and it has to be the first if one exists, and the remaining s are contrastive. The following sentence illustrates the difference;
The first interpretation is the thematic, treating "the people I know" as the theme of the predicate "none came". That is, if the speaker knows A, B,..., Z, then none of the people who came were A, B,..., Z. The second interpretation is the contrastive. If the likely attendees were A, B,..., Z, and of them the speaker knows P, Q and R, then the sentence says that P, Q and R did not come. The sentence says nothing about A', B',..., Z', all of whom the speaker knows, but none of whom were likely to come. In practice, the first interpretation is the likely one.

Exhaustive

Unlike, the subject particle nominates its referent as the sole satisfier of the predicate. This distinction is famously illustrated by the following pair of sentences:
The distinction between each example sentence may be made easier to understand if thought of in terms of the question each statement could answer. The first example sentence could answer the question:
Whereas the second example sentence could answer the question:
Similarly, in a restaurant, if asked by the waitstaff who has ordered the eels, the customer who ordered it could say:

Objective

For certain verbs, is typically used instead of to mark what would be the direct object in English:
There are various common expressions that use verbs in English, often transitive verbs, where the action happens to a specific object: "to be able to do something", "to want something", "to like something", "to dislike something". These same ideas are expressed in Japanese using adjectives and intransitive verbs that describe a subject, instead of actions that happen to an object: "to be possible", "to be desired/desirable", "to be liked", "to be disliked". The equivalent of the English subject is instead the topic in Japanese and thus marked by, reflecting the topic-prominent nature of Japanese grammar.
Since these constructions in English describe an object, whereas the Japanese equivalents describe a subject marked with, some sources call this usage of the "objective ga". Strictly speaking, this label may be misleading, as there is no object in the Japanese constructions.
As an example, the Japanese verb is often glossed as transitive English verb "to understand". However, wakaru is an intransitive verb that describes a subject, so a more literal gloss would be "to be understandable".

Objects, locatives, instrumentals: , , ,

The direct object of transitive verbs is indicated by the object particle.
This particle can also mean "through" or "along" or "out of" when used with motion verbs:
The general instrumental particle is, which can be translated as "using" or "by":
This particle also has other uses: "at" :
"In":
"With" or "in ":
The general locative particle is.
In this function it is interchangeable with. However, has additional uses: "at ":
"On":
"In ", "at ":

Quantity and extents: , , , , ,

To conjoin nouns, と to is used.
The additive particle can be used to conjoin larger nominals and clauses.
For an incomplete list of conjuncts, is used.
When only one of the conjuncts is necessary, the disjunctive particle is used.
Quantities are listed between 'from' and 'to'.
This pair can also be used to indicate time or space.
Because indicates starting point or origin, it has a related use as "because", analogously to English "since" :
The particle and a related particle are used to indicate lowest extents: prices, business hours, etc.
is also used in the sense of "than".

Coordinating: , ,

The particle is used to set off quotations.
It is also used to indicate a manner of similarity, "as if", "like" or "the way".
In a related conditional use, it functions like "after/when", or "upon".
Finally it is used with verbs like to meet or to speak .
This last use is also a function of the particle, but indicates reciprocation which does not.
Finally, the particle is used in a hortative or vocative sense.

Final: , , and related

The sentence-final particle turns a declarative sentence into a question.
Other sentence-final particles add emotional or emphatic impact to the sentence. The particle softens a declarative sentence, similar to English "you know?", "eh?", "I tell you!", "isn't it?", "aren't you?", etc.
A final is used in order to soften insistence, warning or command, which would sound very strong without any final particles.
There are many such emphatic particles; some examples: and usually used by males; a less formal form of ; used like by females, etc. They are essentially limited to speech or transcribed dialogue.

Compound particles

Compound particles are formed with at least one particle together with other words, including other particles. The commonly seen forms are:

particle + verb
particle + noun + particle
noun + particle

Other structures are rarer, though possible. A few examples:

Auxiliary verbs

All auxiliary verbs attach to a verbal or adjectival stem form and conjugate as verbs. In modern Japanese there are two distinct classes of auxiliary verbs:
; Pure auxiliaries : are usually just called verb endings or conjugated forms. These auxiliaries do not function as independent verbs.
; Helper auxiliaries : are normal verbs that lose their independent meaning when used as auxiliaries.
In classical Japanese, which was more heavily agglutinating than modern Japanese, the category of auxiliary verb included every verbal ending after the stem form, and most of these endings were themselves inflected. In modern Japanese, however, some of them have stopped being productive. The prime example is the classical auxiliary, whose modern forms and are no longer viewed as inflections of the same suffix, and can take no further affixes.

auxiliary	group	attaches to	meaning modification	example
	irregular¹	continuative	makes the sentence polite	→
²	2b	irrealis of grp. 2	makes V passive/honorific/potential	→ →
	2b	irrealis of grp. 1	makes V passive/honorific	→
³	2b	irrealis of grp. 2	makes V causative	→
	2b	irrealis of grp. 1	makes V causative	→

has stem forms: irrealis ませ and ましょ, continuative まし, terminal ます, attributive ます, hypothetical ますれ, imperative ませ.
in potential usage is sometimes shortened to ; thus instead of. However, it is considered non-standard.
is sometimes shortened to , but this usage is somewhat literary.

Much of the agglutinative flavour of Japanese stems from helper auxiliaries, however. The following table contains a small selection of many such auxiliary verbs.

auxiliary	group	attaches to	meaning modification	example
	1	form only for trans.	indicates state modification	→
	2a	form for trans.	progressive aspect	→
	2a	form for intrans.	indicates state modification	→
	1	form	"do something in advance"	→
	1	form	"keep"	→
	1	form	"goes on V-ing"	→
		form	inception, "start to V"	→
		form	perfection, "have V-ed"	→
		form	conclusion, "come to V"	→
	2b	continuative non-punctual	"V begins", "begin to V"	→
	2b	continuative punctual & subj. must be plural	"V begins", "begin to V"	→
	1	continuative	"start to V"	→
	1	form	"try to V"	→
	1	continuative	"do V again, correcting mistakes"	→
	1	continuative	"do V thoroughly" / "V happens upwards"	→ →
		continuative	indicates potential	→
	1	continuative only for intrans., non-volit.	"about to V", "almost V", "to start to V"	→
	1	continuative	"do V completely"	→
	1	continuative	"cancel by V" "deny with V"	→
	1	continuative	"V deep in", "V into"	→
	2b	continuative	"V down"	→
	2a	continuative	"overdo V"	→
	2b	continuative	"become accustomed to V"	→
	2b	continuative	"keep on V"	→
	1	continuative	"finish V-ing"	→
	2b	continuative only for intrans.	"V through"	→
	1	continuative	"by doing V, leave something behind"	→
	1	continuative only for intrans.	"be left behind, doing V"	→
	2b	continuative	"the proper way to V"	→
	2b	continuative	"to forget to V"	→
'to come together'	1	continuative	"to do V to each other", "to do V together"	→

Note: is the only modern verb of shimo nidan type, with conjugations: irrealis え, continuative え, terminal える or うる, attributive うる, hypothetical うれ, imperative えろ or えよ.