Japanese

Japanese is a language spoken by approximately 128 million people, primarily in Japan. It belongs to the Japonic language family and is known for its complex writing system and unique grammatical structures. 

Japanese can be challenging to learn, particularly the writing system and complex grammar, but it is a rewarding language to master.

The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) assesses Japanese language proficiency across five levels. 

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo; [ɲihoŋɡo] ^ⓘ) 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 (794–1185), extensive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) 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 (modern Tokyo) in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid 19th century). 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 kanji (漢字, ‘Han characters’), with two unique syllabaries (or moraic scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名, ‘simple characters’) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名, ‘partial characters’). Latin script (rōmaji ローマ字) is also used in a limited fashion (such as for imported acronyms) in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.

History

Further information: Japanese writing system § History of the Japanese script

Prehistory

Proto-Japonic, 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 (the Yayoi period), replacing the languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants,^[2] 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.^[3]

Old Japanese

Main article: Old Japanese

The Chinese writing system was imported to Japan from Baekje around the start of the fifth century, alongside Buddhism.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6] 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 き (ki), ひ (hi), み (mi), け (ke), へ (he), め (me), こ (ko), そ (so), と (to), の (no), も (mo), よ (yo) and ろ (ro).^[7] (The Kojiki has 88, but all later texts have 87. The distinction between mo₁ and mo₂ apparently was lost immediately following its composition.) 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 /je/, which merges with /e/ before the end of the period.

Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu (superseded by modern no) is preserved in words such as matsuge (“eyelash”, lit. “hair of the eye”); modern mieru (“to be visible”) and kikoeru (“to be audible”) retain a mediopassive suffix –yu(ru) (kikoyu → kikoyuru (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) → kikoeru (all verbs with the shimo-nidan conjugation pattern underwent this same shift in Early Modern Japanese)); 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 (e.g. kya) and labial consonant clusters (e.g. kwa), and closed syllables.^[8][9] This had the effect of changing Japanese into a mora-timed language.^[8]

Late Middle Japanese

Main article: 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 (for instance, the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam). Among other sound changes, the sequence /au/ merges to /ɔː/, in contrast with /oː/; /p/ is reintroduced from Chinese; and /we/ merges with /je/. Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending –te begins to reduce onto the verb (e.g. yonde for earlier yomite), the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out (shiroi for earlier shiroki); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. hayaku > hayau > hayɔɔ, where modern Japanese just has hayaku, though the alternative form is preserved in the standard greeting o-hayō gozaimasu “good morning”; this ending is also seen in o-medetō “congratulations”, from medetaku).

Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include pan (“bread”) and tabako (“tobacco”, now “cigarette”), both from Portuguese.

Modern Japanese

“Standard Japanese” redirects here. For other dialects, see Japanese dialects.

Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period (which spanned from 1603 to 1867). Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) 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 languages—such as German (e.g. arubaito ‘temporary job’, wakuchin ‘vaccine’), Portuguese (kasutera ‘sponge cake’) and English.^[10] Many English loan words especially relate to technology—for example, pasokon ‘personal computer’, intānetto ‘internet’, and kamera ‘camera’. Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between [tɕi] and [ti], and [dʑi] and [di], with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords, eg. paati for party or dizunii for Disney.^[11]

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,^[12] 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 (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil,^[13] with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendants, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than the 1.2 million of the United States)^[14] sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese,^[15] with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially in the eastern states), Canada (especially in Vancouver, where 1.4% of the population has Japanese ancestry),^[16] the United States (notably in Hawaii, where 16.7% of the population has Japanese ancestry,^{[17][clarification needed]} and California), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao Region and the Province of Laguna).^[18][19][20]

Official status

Japanese has no official status in Japan,^[21] but is the de facto national language of the country. There is a form of the language considered standard: hyōjungo (標準語), meaning ‘standard Japanese’, or kyōtsūgo (共通語), ‘common language’, or even ‘Tokyo dialect’ at times.^[22] The meanings of the two terms (hyōjungo and kyōtsūgo) 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 (明治維新, meiji ishin; 1868) from the language spoken in the higher-class areas of Tokyo (see Yamanote). Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications.^[23] It is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.

Bungo (文語; ‘literary language‘) used in formal texts, is different compared to the colloquial language (口語, kōgo), used in everyday speech.^[24] 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 (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). 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.^[25] 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,^[26] 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.^[27] However, as of the 2005 Palau census, no residents of Angaur were reported to speak Japanese at home.^[28]

Dialects and mutual intelligibility

Main article: Japanese dialects

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 (excluding Ryūkyūan languages and Tōhoku dialects) to students from Greater Tokyo were the Kiso dialect (in the deep mountains of Nagano Prefecture), the Himi dialect (in Toyama Prefecture), the Kagoshima dialect and the Maniwa dialect (in Okayama Prefecture).^[29] 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.^[29]

There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands^{[clarification needed]} 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 (see Kansai dialect). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers.

The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (administratively part of Kagoshima), 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,^[30] 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.^[31] 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.^[32]

Modern Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including the Ryūkyū islands) due to education, mass media, and an increase in mobility within Japan, as well as economic integration.

Classification

Main article: Classification of the Japonic languages

Japanese is a member of the Japonic language family, which also includes the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is sometimes called a language isolate.^[33]

According to Martine Robbeets, Japanese has been subject to more attempts to show its relation to other languages than any other language in the world. Since Japanese first gained the consideration of linguists in the late 19th century, attempts have been made to show its genealogical relation to languages or language families such as Ainu, Korean, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Uralic, Altaic (or Ural-Altaic), Austroasiatic, Austronesian and Dravidian.^[34] At the fringe, some linguists have even suggested a link to Indo-European languages, including Greek, or to Sumerian.^[35] Main modern theories try to link Japanese either to northern Asian languages, like Korean or the proposed larger Altaic family, or to various Southeast Asian languages, especially Austronesian. None of these proposals have gained wide acceptance (and the Altaic family itself is now considered controversial).^[36][37][38] As it stands, only the link to Ryukyuan has wide support.^[39]

Other theories view the Japanese language as an early creole language formed through inputs from at least two distinct language groups, or as a distinct language of its own that has absorbed various aspects from neighboring languages.^[40][41][42]

Writing system

Japanese writing system and Japanese Braille

History

Literacy was introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, by way of Baekje before the 5th century AD.^{[44][45][46][47]} Using this script, the Japanese king Bu presented a petition to Emperor Shun of Song in AD 478.^[a] After the ruin of Baekje, Japan invited scholars from China to learn more of the Chinese writing system. Japanese emperors gave an official rank to Chinese scholars (続守言/薩弘恪/^[b][c]袁晋卿^[d]) and spread the use of Chinese characters during the 7th and 8th centuries.

At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, with Japanese names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds. Later, during the 7th century AD, the Chinese-sounding phoneme principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose, but some Japanese words were still written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. This was the beginning of Japanese as a written language in its own right. By this time, the Japanese language was already very distinct from the Ryukyuan languages.^[48]

An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in AD 712. Japanese writers then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man’yōgana, a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech mora by mora.

Over time, a writing system evolved. Chinese characters (kanji) were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements; these were simplified, and eventually became two moraic scripts: hiragana and katakana which were developed based on Man’yōgana. Some scholars claim that Manyogana originated from Baekje, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars.^[49][50]

Hiragana and katakana were first simplified from kanji, and hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century,^[51] was mainly used by women. Hiragana was seen as an informal language, whereas katakana and kanji were considered more formal and were typically used by men and in official settings. However, because of hiragana’s accessibility, more and more people began using it. Eventually, by the 10th century, hiragana was used by everyone.^[52]

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin script (or rōmaji in Japanese) is used to a certain extent, such as for imported acronyms and to transcribe Japanese names and in other instances where non-Japanese speakers need to know how to pronounce a word (such as “ramen” at a restaurant). Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji numerals when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as 統一 (tōitsu, “unification”).

A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of kyōiku kanji (“education kanji”, a subset of jōyō kanji), specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 1,130 characters in junior high school, covering in total 2,136 jōyō kanji. The official list of jōyō kanji has been revised several times, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters has remained largely unchanged.

As for kanji for personal names, the circumstances are somewhat complicated. Jōyō kanji and jinmeiyō kanji (an appendix of additional characters for names) are approved for registering personal names. Names containing unapproved characters are denied registration. However, as with the list of jōyō kanji, criteria for inclusion were often arbitrary and led to many common and popular characters being disapproved for use. Under popular pressure and following a court decision holding the exclusion of common characters unlawful, the list of jinmeiyō kanji was substantially extended from 92 in 1951 (the year it was first decreed) to 983 in 2004. Furthermore, families whose names are not on these lists were permitted to continue using the older forms.

Hiragana

Hiragana are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji, for replacement of rare kanji that may be unfamiliar to intended readers, and also following kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs (and adjectives) in Japanese are conjugated, kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing their meaning. For this reason, hiragana are appended to kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. Hiragana used in this way are called okurigana. Hiragana can also be written in a superscript called furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading. This is done to facilitate learning, as well as to clarify particularly old or obscure (or sometimes invented) readings.

Katakana

Katakana, like hiragana, constitute a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. For example, “Australia” has been adapted as Ōsutoraria (オーストラリア), and “supermarket” has been adapted and shortened into sūpā (スーパー).

Japanese word order is classified as subject–object–verb. Unlike many Indo-European languages, the only strict rule of word order is that the verb must be placed at the end of a sentence (possibly followed by sentence-end particles). This is because Japanese sentence elements are marked with particles that identify their grammatical functions.

The basic sentence structure is topic–comment. Once the topic has been stated using the particle wa (は), it is normally omitted in subsequent sentences, and the next use of wa will change the topic. For instance, someone may begin a conversation with a sentence that includes Tanaka-san wa… (田中さんは…, “As for Mx. Tanaka, …”). Each person may say a number of comments regarding Tanaka as the topic, and someone could change the topic to Naoko with a sentence including Naoko-san wa… (直子さんは…, “As for Mx. Naoko, …”).

As these example translations illustrate, a sentence may include a topic, but the topic is not part of sentence’s core statement. Japanese is often called a topic-prominent language because of its strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. That is, a sentence might not involve the topic directly at all. To replicate this effect in English, consider “As for Naoko, people are rude.” The topic, “Naoko,” provides context to the comment about the subject, “people,” and the sentence as a whole indicates that “people are rude” is a statement relevant to Naoko. However, the sentence’s comment does not describe Naoko directly at all, and whatever the sentence indicates about Naoko is an inference. The topic is not the core of the sentence; the core of the sentence is always the comment.

In a basic comment, the subject is marked with the particle ga (が), and the rest of the comment describes the subject. For example, in Zou ga doubutsu da (象が動物だ), ga indicates that “elephant” is the subject of the sentence. Context determines whether the speaker means a single elephant or elephants plural. The copula da (だ, the verb “is”) ends the sentence, indicating that the subject is equivalent to the rest of the comment. Here, doubutsu means animal. Therefore, the sentence means “[The] elephant is [an] animal” or “Elephants are animals.” A basic comment can end in three ways: with the copula da, with a different verb, or with an adjective ending in the kana i (い). A sentence ending might also be decorated with particles that alter the way the sentence is meant to be interpreted, as in Zou ga doubutsu da yo (象が動物だよ, “Elephants are animals, you know.”). This is also why da is replaced with desu (です) when the speaker is talking to someone they do not know well: it makes the sentence more polite.

Often, ga implies distinction of the subject within the topic, so the previous example comment would make the most sense within a topic where not all of the relevant subjects were animals. For example, in Kono ganbutsu wa zou ga doubutsu da (この贋物は象が動物だ), the particle wa indicates the topic is kono ganbutsu (“this toy” or “these toys”). In English, if there are many toys and one is an elephant, this could mean “Among these toys, [the] elephant is [an] animal.” That said, if the subject is clearly a subtopic, this differentiation effect may or may not be relevant, such as in nihongo wa bunpo ga yasashii (日本語は文法が優しい). The equivalent sentence, “As for the Japanese language, grammar is easy,” might be a general statement that Japanese grammar is easy or a statement that grammar is an especially easy feature of the Japanese language. Context should reveal which.

Because ga marks the subject of the sentence but the sentence overall is intended to be relevant to the topic indicated by wa, translations of Japanese into English often elide the difference between these particles. 

Japanese grammar tends toward brevity; the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated and pronouns may be omitted if they can be inferred from context. 

Nevertheless, unlike the topic, the subject is always implied: all sentences which omit a ga particle must have an implied subject that could be specified with a ga particle. 

While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some Indo-European languages, and function differently. In some cases, Japanese relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: “down” to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group, and “up” to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. 

Japanese “pronouns” also function differently from most modern Indo-European pronouns (and more like nouns) in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. For instance, one does not say in English:

The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as watashi (私; literally “private”) or watakushi (also 私, hyper-polite form), while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word ore (俺, “oneself”, “myself”) or boku. Similarly, different words such as anata, kimi, and omae (お前, more formally 御前 “the one before me”) may refer to a listener depending on the listener’s relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. When used in different social relationships, the same word may have positive (intimate or respectful) or negative (distant or disrespectful) connotations.

Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English. For example, when speaking to one’s teacher, it is appropriate to use sensei (先生, “teacher”), but inappropriate to use anata. This is because anata is used to refer to people of equal or lower status, and one’s teacher has higher status.

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