Japanese language
Japanese is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.
The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic, and the now discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance.
Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period, extensive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese saw extensive grammatical changes and the first appearance of European loanwords. The basis of the standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo region in the Early Modern Japanese period. Following the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly, and words from English roots have proliferated.
Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively 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 form 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.
The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters, known as, with two unique syllabaries derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: and . Latin script is also used in a limited fashion in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.
History
Prehistory
, the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from the Korean peninsula sometime in the early- to mid-4th century BC, replacing the languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language. Because writing had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence, and anything that can be discerned about this period must be based on internal reconstruction from Old Japanese, or comparison with the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese dialects.Old Japanese
The Chinese writing system was imported to Japan from Baekje around the start of the fifth century, alongside Buddhism. The earliest texts were written in Classical Chinese, although some of these were likely intended to be read as Japanese using the kanbun method, and show influences of Japanese grammar such as Japanese word order. The earliest text, the Kojiki, dates to the early eighth century, and was written entirely in Chinese characters, which are used to represent, at different times, Chinese, kanbun, and Old Japanese. As in other texts from this period, the Old Japanese sections are written in Man'yōgana, which uses kanji for their phonetic as well as semantic values.Based on the Man'yōgana system, Old Japanese can be reconstructed as having 88 distinct morae. Texts written with Man'yōgana use two different sets of kanji for each of the morae now pronounced,,,,,,,,,,, and. This set of morae shrank to 67 in Early Middle Japanese, though some were added through Chinese influence. Man'yōgana also has a symbol for, which merges with before the end of the period.
Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu is preserved in words such as matsuge ; modern mieru and kikoeru retain a mediopassive suffix -yu → kikoeru ); and the genitive particle ga remains in intentionally archaic speech.
Early Middle Japanese
Early Middle Japanese is the Japanese of the Heian period, from 794 to 1185. It formed the basis for the literary standard of Classical Japanese, which remained in common use until the early 20th century.During this time, Japanese underwent numerous phonological developments, in many cases instigated by an influx of Chinese loanwords. These included phonemic length distinction for both consonants and vowels, palatal consonants and labial consonant clusters, and closed syllables. This changed Japanese into a mora-timed language.
Late Middle Japanese
Late Middle Japanese covers the years from 1185 to 1600, and is normally divided into two sections, roughly equivalent to the Kamakura period and the Muromachi period, respectively. The later forms of Late Middle Japanese are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese phonology than for previous forms. Among other sound changes, the sequence merges to, in contrast with ; is reintroduced from Chinese; and merges with. Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending -te begins to reduce onto the verb, the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out ; and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form.Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include pan and tabako, both from Portuguese.
Modern Japanese
Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period. Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languagessuch as German, Portuguese and English. Many English loan words especially relate to technologyfor example, 'personal computer', 'internet', and 'camera'. Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between and, and and, with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords, e.g. for party or for Disney.Geographic distribution
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has also been spoken outside of the country. Before and during World War II, through Japanese annexation of Taiwan and Korea, as well as partial occupation of China, the Philippines, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries learned Japanese as the language of the empire. As a result, many elderly people in these countries can still speak Japanese.Japanese emigrant communities sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese, with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the Philippines.
Official status
Japanese has no official status in Japan, but is the de facto national language of the country. There is a form of the language considered standard:, meaning, or,, or even at times. The meanings of the two terms are almost the same. Hyōjungo or kyōtsūgo is a conception that forms the counterpart of dialect. This normative language was born after the Meiji Restoration from the language spoken in the higher-class areas of Tokyo. Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications. It is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.2=文語 used in formal texts, is different compared to the Colloquialism, used in everyday speech. The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kōgo gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. Bungo still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers. Kōgo is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.
Japanese is, along with Palauan and English, an official language of Angaur, Palau according to the 1982 state constitution. At the time it was written, many of the elders participating in the process had been educated in Japanese during the South Seas Mandate over the island, as shown by the 1958 census of the Trust Territory of the Pacific which found that 89% of Palauans born between 1914 and 1933 could speak and read Japanese. However, as of the 2005 Palau census, no residents of Angaur were reported to speak Japanese at home.
Dialects and mutual intelligibility
Japanese dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is less common.In terms of mutual intelligibility, a survey in 1967 found that the four most unintelligible dialects to students from Greater Tokyo were the Kiso dialect, the Himi dialect, the Kagoshima dialect and the Maniwa dialect. The survey was based on 12- to 20-second-long recordings of 135 to 244 phonemes, which 42 students listened to and translated word-for-word. The listeners were all Keio University students who grew up in the Kantō region.
| Dialect | Kyoto City | Ōgata, Kōchi | Tatsuta, Aichi | Kumamoto City | Osaka City | Kanagi, Shimane | Maniwa, Okayama | Kagoshima City | Kiso, Nagano | Himi, Toyama |
| Percentage | 67.1% | 45.5% | 44.5% | 38.6% | 26.4% | 24.8% | 24.7% | 17.6% | 13.3% | 4.1% |
There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island, whose dialects are descended from Eastern Old Japanese. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy. Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers.
The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands, 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, most likely the spoken form of Classical Japanese, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began to decline during the late Meiji period. The Ryūkyūan languages are classified by UNESCO as 'endangered', as young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand the languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryūkyūan languages, and is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands.
Modern Japanese has become prevalent nationwide due to education, mass media, and an increase in mobility within Japan, as well as economic integration.