Search results
Learn about the history, features, and writing system of Japanese, the principal language of the Japonic family spoken by 120 million people. Explore the prehistory, Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese periods, as well as the influence of Chinese and European languages.
- Classification of the Japonic languages - Wikipedia
The classification of the Japonic languages and their...
- Japan - Wikipedia
Japan [a] is an island country in East Asia.It is located in...
- Japanese Wikipedia - Wikipedia
The Japanese Wikipedia (ウィキペディア日本語版, Wikipedia Nihongoban,...
- Japonic languages - Wikipedia
Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan (Japanese: 日琉語族, romanized:...
- Japanese Wikipedia - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ...
The Japanese Wikipedia ( Japanese: ウィキペディア日本語版) is the...
- Japanese language - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ...
The Japanese language (Japanese: 日本語, romanized: Nihongo) is...
- Classification of the Japonic languages - Wikipedia
People also ask
What language is spoken in Japan?
Is Japan a peninsular language?
What is the Japanese version of Wikipedia?
Is Japanese a Chinese language?
Learn about the history, characteristics, policies and controversies of the Japanese Wikipedia, the fourth largest and second most visited Wikipedia edition. Find out how it differs from other Wikipedias in editing, legal issues, community and perspective.
- Overview
- Hypotheses of genetic affiliation
- Dialects
- Literary history
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in...
Click Here to see full-size tableJapanese is the only major language whose genetic affiliation is not known. The hypothesis relating Japanese to Korean remains the strongest, but other hypotheses also have been advanced. Some attempt to relate Japanese to the language groups of South Asia such as the Austronesian, the Austroasiatic, and the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, efforts were focused more on the origins of the Japanese language than on its genetic affiliation per se; specifically, linguists attempted to reconcile some conflicting linguistic traits.
An increasingly popular theory along that line posits that the mixed nature of Japanese results from its Austronesian lexical substratum and the Altaic grammatical superstratum. According to one version of that hypothesis, a language of southern origin with a phonological system like those of Austronesian languages was spoken in Japan during the prehistoric Jōmon era (c. 10,500 to c. 300 bce). As the Yayoi culture was introduced to Japan from the Asian continent about 300 bce, a language of southern Korea began to spread eastward from the southern island of Kyushu along with that culture, which also introduced to Japan iron and bronze implements and the cultivation of rice. Because the migration from Korea did not take place on a large scale, the new language did not eradicate certain older lexical items, though it was able to change the grammatical structure of the existing language. Thus, that theory maintains, Japanese must be said to be genetically related to Korean (and perhaps ultimately to Altaic languages), though it contains Austronesian lexical residues. The Altaic theory, however, is not widely accepted.
The country’s geography, characterized by high mountain peaks and deep valleys as well as by small isolated islands, has fostered the development of various dialects throughout the archipelago. Different dialects are often mutually unintelligible; the speakers of the Kagoshima dialect of Kyushu are not understood by the majority of the people of the main island of Honshu. Likewise, northern dialect speakers from such places as Aomori and Akita are not understood by most people in metropolitan Tokyo or anywhere in western Japan. Japanese dialectologists agree that a major dialect boundary separates Okinawan dialects of the Ryukyu Islands from the rest of the mainland dialects. The latter are then divided into either three groups—Eastern, Western, and Kyushu dialects—or simply Eastern and Western dialects, the latter including the Kyushu group. Linguistic unification has been achieved by the spread of the kyōtsū-go “common language,” which is based on the Tokyo dialect. A standardized written language has been a feature of compulsory education, which started in 1886. Modern mobility and mass media also have helped to level dialectal differences and have had a strong effect on the accelerated rate of the loss of local dialects.
Britannica Quiz
Written records of Japanese date to the 8th century, the oldest among them being the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”). If the history of the language were to be split in two, the division would fall somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, when the language shed most of its Old Japanese characteristics and acquired those of the mode...
Learn about the Japanese language, a language isolate with more than 127 million speakers and a rich literary history. Explore its origin, family, alphabets, grammar, writing, and dialects with Britannica.
- Masayoshi Shibatani
Japonic is a language family comprising Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, spoken in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Learn about their history, classification, distribution, and endangerment.
Learn about the official language of Japan, its history, writing systems, sounds, grammar, and words. Find out how Japanese is related to other languages, how it uses suffixes and particles, and how it has borrowed words from English.
Learn about the Japanese Wikipedia, the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia started in 2002. It has over 1 million articles and is the 13th largest edition by article count.
Apr 23, 2023 · A guide to the Japanese Wikipedia. This is a guide to the Japanese Wikipedia for non-native speakers of Japanese. Most of the contents can of course be applied to other Japanese projects. Where to ask questions and get help. There are currently three places for someone to ask a question or help, or make an announcement.