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Japanese is an East Asian language spoken primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is part of the Japonic language family and has around 128 million speakers. While its origins are unclear, Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded some Japanese words but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. Japanese has been influenced by Chinese but is not genealogically related, and uses Chinese characters (kanji) along with two syllabic scripts and some Latin characters.

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50 views1 page

My Text Book

Japanese is an East Asian language spoken primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is part of the Japonic language family and has around 128 million speakers. While its origins are unclear, Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded some Japanese words but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. Japanese has been influenced by Chinese but is not genealogically related, and uses Chinese characters (kanji) along with two syllabic scripts and some Latin characters.

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JOSHUA MANIQUEZ
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Japanese (日本語, Nihongo [ɲihoŋɡo] (About this soundlisten)) is an East Asian

language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan, where it is the
national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language
family, and its ultimate derivation and relation to other languages is unclear.
Japonic languages have been grouped with other language families such as Ainu,
Austroasiatic, Korean, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals
has gained 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 texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period
(794–1185) in Japan, the Chinese language had considerable influence on the
vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included
changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, and the first
appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region
in the south, up 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. English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese
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 make 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.

Japanese has no clear genealogical relationship with Chinese,[2] though in its


written form it makes prevalent use of Chinese characters, known as kanji (漢字),
and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. The Japanese
writing system also uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮
名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名), however Latin script is used in a limited
fashion (such as for imported acronyms). The numeral system uses mostly Arabic
numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.

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