Japanese Language

The Japanese language ranks sixth in number of speakers worldwide after Chinese, English, Russian, Hindi, and Spanish. Most Japanese speakers are located within Japan, although there are also immigrant communities in the Americas and other parts of the world where a small number of Japanese speakers can be found. As Japan is said to be a linguistically homogeneous nation, most of its approximately 127 million residents do speak Japanese. It is important to remember, however, that Japan is also home to linguistic minorities such as the Ainu, Okinawans, and permanent foreign residents.

Scholars debate the origins of the Japanese language, and arguments have been made for links to Altaic languages (such as Mongolian), Korean, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), Malayo-Polynesian languages, and Tibeto-Burmese. It seems probable that the Japanese language originated as a mix of languages from Central and Southeast Asia and had fully developed into a distinct language by the time of the Yayoi culture (300 BCE–300 CE).

While the Japanese use the Chinese system of writing, the Japanese language is not related to the Chinese language. The writing system was borrowed from Chinese during the fifth or sixth century, long after the development of spoken Japanese. The earliest known writings in Japanese date back to the eighth century.

Japanese has five vowels (a, i, u, e, o), which are similar in pronunciation to the vowels of Spanish and Italian. Each vowel can also be elongated, doubling the duration of its pronunciation.

The sound system of Japanese is straightforward; there are few exceptions to established pronunciation rules, and each character in a word is pronounced. Unlike some languages, sounds are constant, and even long words can be sounded out easily. Sound units are composed of a consonant plus a vowel or a vowel alone. Only the consonant n can occur completely unattached to a vowel.

Japanese is a pitch-based language, unlike English, which is based on stress. Each syllable in a Japanese word is stressed equally, but the pitch of syllables rises and falls. Consequently, pronunciation of Japanese words is steady and even compared with English.

The literacy rate in Japan is officially reported at 99 percent of the population, which shows the emphasis placed on the written language. Japanese utilizes four distinct systems of writing: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji (romanization). These writing systems are used together, and occasionally all four are found in a single sentence. More commonly, two or three of the systems will be used in one sentence; it is extremely uncommon to find a sentence incorporating only one writing system.

Kanji is the Japanese name for the simplified pictographs borrowed from Chinese, which represent whole words and are not phonetic. Although elements of a kanji may at times offer clues to its pronunciation, there are no foolproof ways of knowing a particular kanji's pronunciation without memorizing its reading. Altogether there are approximately 50,000 kanji, but the Japanese government has limited to 1,945 the number necessary for daily use. Educated Japanese adults can usually recognize at least two to three thousand characters.

Kana, a term that covers both hiragana and katakana, originated from the simplification of kanji in the ninth and tenth centuries, and reflect phonological characteristics of Japanese. In other words, while kanji represent whole words, kana simply represent sounds that are combined to form words. There are forty-eight sound units that can be expressed in both hiragana and katakana. These units represent vowels, consonant-vowel combinations, and the single consonant n. Hiragana are a cursive style and are used mainly for verb and adjective endings and other grammatical markers. Katakana are much more angular. They are regularly used for onomatopoeias and loan-words from other languages, in a manner somewhat similar to italics in English.

The fourth writing system is the roman alphabet (romaji), which is used primarily for company names and in advertising. For example, the company name Sony is always written in romaji. There are two systems of romanization, Hepburn and Kunrei, both of which are used in Japan and overseas.

Japanese can be written either vertically or horizontally. Traditionally, Japanese was written vertically from right to left; the first page of a Japanese book would be considered the last page of a Western book. This format continues in newspapers and some books, but many magazines and books are printed horizontally from left to right.

Japanese is a language with a flexible subject-object-verb word order. The only word order restriction is that the verb must come at the end of a sentence; otherwise, words can be randomly ordered because of the presence of conjugational suffixes and case particles that mark the function of words in a sentence.

Nouns in Japanese do not change for gender, case, or number. Verbs and adjectives in Japanese must be conjugated; verb conjugation is straightforward and there are few irregularities. There are no articles in Japanese.

An important aspect of the Japanese language is a complex system of honorific verbs. Because Japanese society is based on strict hierarchies, those hierarchies are expressed in the language. Humble verb forms are used when speakers refer to themselves, and exalted forms are used when addressing a person of higher rank or status. Positions can be based on social status, rank, gender, age, or any combination thereof. In addition, male and female speech is differentiated, with female speech usually taking more polite forms and male speech often coming across as more direct.

In addition to standard Japanese, based on the Tokyo dialect, there are a number of regional and local dialects of Japanese. Because mass media and compulsory education have familiarized people around the country with the standard dialect, most Japanese now speak both standard Japanese and their local dialect. The Kansai dialect, spoken in Kyoto and Osaka, is one of the most well-known dialects and is a source of pride for people from that region.

Another factor causing language change in Japan is the incorporation of a large number of loanwords. There are loanwords from a variety of languages, and since the end of World War II, the number of English loan-words has increased rapidly. Loanwords such as apaato (apartment), hanbaagaa (hamburger), and basukettobooru (basketball) are written in katakana. The increasing number of new loanwords being used in Japanese has caused confusion among older Japanese, who worry that Japanese is losing its traditional identity.

Hane, Mikiso. (1986) Modern Japan: A Historical Survey. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Loveday, Leo J. (1996) Language Contact in Japan: A Socio-Linguistic History. Oxford Studies in Language Contact. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990) The Languages of Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

SWET [Society of Writers, Editors & Translators]. (1998) Japan Style Sheet: The SWET Guide for Writers, Editors and Translators. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.

Tsujimura, Natsuko. (1996) An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

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