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Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period, when the capital was Heijō-kyō. That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the Kojiki. The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the Nihon Shoki and the Man'yōshū, a compilation of over 4,500 poems. Shorter samples are 25 poems in the Fudoki and the 21 poems of the Bussokuseki-kahi. The latter has the virtue of being an original ...

Artifacts inscribed with Chinese characters dated as early as the 1st century AD have been found in Japan, but detailed knowledge of the script seems not to have reached the islands until the early 5th century. According to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the script was brought by scholars from Baekje. The earliest texts found in Japan were written in Classical Chinese, probably by immigrant scribes. Later "hybrid" texts show the influence of Japanese grammar, such as the word order. Chinese and Kor

There is no consensus on the pronunciation of the syllables distinguished by man'yōgana. One difficulty is that the Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters used are also disputed, and since the reconstruction of their phonetic values is partly based on later Sino-Japanese pronunciations, there is a danger of circular reasoning. Additional evidence has been drawn from phonological typology, subsequent developments in the Japanese pronunciation, and the comparative study of the ...

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word order was predominantly subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles consistently appended to the main verb.

Although most Old Japanese writing represents the language of the Nara court in central Japan, some sources come from eastern Japan