Japanese language

In East Asia, Japanese is a language spoken by around 128 million people, the majority of whom live in Japan, where it is the national language. Despite the fact that it is a part of the Japonic language family (also known as Japanese-Ryukyuan), its ultimate origin and relationship to other languages are uncertain. However, none of these hypotheses has received general recognition. Japonic languages have been lumped in with other language families such as Ainu, Austroasiatic, Korean, and the now-discredited Altaic, among others.

There is little information available about the language's prehistory or when it first originated in Japan. Chinese papers from the 3rd century AD documented a few Japanese terms, but it was not until the 8th century that extensive publications about the Japanese language appeared. Japanese vocabulary and pronunciation were greatly influenced by the Chinese language throughout Japan's Heian period (794–1185), when the Chinese language was widely spoken in the country. The Late Middle Japanese period (1185–1600) saw the introduction of new elements that moved the language closer to the contemporary state, as well as the first appearance of European loanwords. During the Early Modern Japanese era (early 17th century–mid 19th century), the standard dialect spread from the Kansai area in the south all the way up to the Edo region (modern Tokyo) in the north. Since 1853, when Japan's self-imposed seclusion finally came to an end, the flow of loanwords from European languages has expanded dramatically. Loanwords from English, in particular, have grown more common, while Japanese words with English origins have become more common as well.

This agglutinative, mora-timed language is distinguished by its comparatively basic phononotactics, which includes a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant lengths, and a lexically relevant pitch-accent. Topic–comment sentences have a subject–object–verb word order, with particles denoting the grammatical function of words, and the sentence structure is subject–comment. Sentence-final particles may be employed to add emotive or emphatic emphasis to a sentence, as well as to ask questions or make statements. Nouns do not have a grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles in the English language. Verbs are conjugated, largely for the purposes of tense and voice, but not for the purpose of person. Japanese adjectives are likewise conjugated in the same way as English adjectives. Japanese honorifics are a complicated system of verb forms and terminology that are used to express the relative rank of the speaker, the listener, and the people who are being referenced.

Japanese has no clear genetic connection to Chinese, despite the fact that it makes extensive use of Chinese symbols, known as kanji, in its written form and that a considerable percentage of its lexicon is derived from Chinese. There are also two syllabic (or moraic) scripts employed in the Japanese writing system: the hiragana and the katakana; however, the Latin script is only used in a restricted number of places (such as for imported acronyms). The number system mostly use Arabic numerals, although it also includes traditional Chinese numerals in certain instances.