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Japanese language


Japanese is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Its recorded history goes back to the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of glyphs: Chinese characters (called kanji), and two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet (called romaji) is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Chinese/Japanese numberings are also commonplace.

The Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created on Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Western languages, primarily English.

Classification

Historical linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, the other member being Ryukyuan. (An older view, still held by many non-specialists, is that Japanese is a language isolate, of which the Ryukyuan languages are dialects.)

The genetic affiliation of the Japonic family is uncertain. Numerous theories have been proposed, relating it to a wide variety of other languages and families, including extinct languages spoken by historic cultures of the Korean peninsula; the Korean language; the Altaic languages; and the Austronesian languages, among many others. It is also often suggested that it may be a creole language combining more than one of these. The various theories are detailed in the main article. At this point, no one theory is generally accepted as correct, and the issue is likely to remain controversial.

Geographic distribution

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken elsewhere. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of the Chinese mainland, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programs. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of, or in addition to, the local languages. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil) frequently employ Japanese as their primary language. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne), and the United States (notably California and Hawaii). There is also a small emigrant community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei ??, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well; many schools, both primary and secondary, offer courses.

Dialects

The main distinction in Japanese dialects is between Tokyo-type (Tokyo-shiki) and Western-type (Keihan-shiki), though Kyushu-type dialects form a smaller third group. Within each type are several subdivisions. The Western-type dialects are actually in the central region, with borders roughly formed by Toyama, Kyoto, Hyogo, and Mie Prefectures; most Shikoku dialects are also Western-type. Dialects further west are actually of the Tokyo type. The final category of dialects are those that are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese; these dialects are spoken in Hachijojima, Tosa, and a very few other locations.

Dialects from peripheral regions, such as Tohoku or Tsushima, may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The several dialects used in Kagoshima in southern Kyushu are famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyushu as well, probably due in part to the Kagoshima dialects' peculiarities of pronunciation, which include the existence of closed syllables (i.e., syllables that end in a consonant, such as /kob/ for Standard Japanese /kumo/ "spider"). The vocabulary of Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect. Kansai-ben, a group of dialects from west-central Japan, is spoken by many Japanese; the Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy.

The Ryukyuan languages, while closely related to Japanese, are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family, and are not dialects of Japanese. They are spoken in the Ryukyu Islands and in some islands that are politically part of Kagoshima Prefecture. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages.

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