Japanese language

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo) is spoken by over 130 million native speakers in Japan and by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is related to the Japonic-Ryukyuan languages. It is the official language of Japan and in Palau, in the island of Angaur.

Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. Dialects differ in pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage. The main distinction in Japanese accents is between Tokyo-type and Kyoto-Osaka-type, though Kyūshū-type dialects form a third, smaller group. Within each type are several subdivisions. Kyoto-Osaka-type dialects are in the central region; most Shikoku dialects are also of that type. The final category of dialects are those that are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese; these dialects are spoken in Hachijō-jima island and a few others.

The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and Amami Islands, are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family. However, many Japanese common people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages.

Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide due to education, mass media, and increase of mobile networks within Japan, as well as economic integration.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: kanji (漢字), modified Chinese characters, hiragana (平仮名), two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, and katakana (片仮名) to write words borrowed from foreign languages. The Latin alphabet, rōmaji (ローマ字), is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also widely used.

Japanese has a subject-object-verb word order. Japanese could be considered a pro-drop language, meaning that the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. In addition, it is commonly felt, particularly in spoken Japanese, that the shorter a sentence is, the better. As a result of this grammatical permissiveness, there is a tendency to gravitate towards brevity; Japanese speakers tend to omit pronouns on the theory they are inferred from the previous sentence, and are therefore understood.

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. Japanese "pronouns" also function differently from most modern Indo-European pronouns in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. Personal pronouns are generally used only in situations requiring special emphasis as to who is doing what to whom. The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the gender of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken.

Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect. Where number is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity or by adding a suffix.

Verbs are conjugated to show two tenses: past and present, or non-past, which is used for the present and the future. Questions have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb.

Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) while honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and their group.

Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loanwords from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a huge number of words from Indo-European languages, mostly English. Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and first Portugal in the 16th century, and then the Netherlands in the 17th century, Portuguese and Dutch have also been influential. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.

In the Meiji era, the Japanese coined many new words using Chinese roots to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans borrowed many of these words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary.

In the past few decades, wasei-eigo (made-in-Japan English) has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as wanpatān ワンパターン (one + pattern, "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and sukinshippu　スキンシップ (skin + -ship, "physical contact"), though coined by compounding English roots, are nonsensical in most non-Japanese contexts; exceptions exist in nearby languages such as Korean, which often use words such as skinship and rimokon (remote control) in the same way as in Japanese.

Many Japanese words have become commonplace in English. Words such as futon, haiku, judo, kamikaze, karaoke, karate, ninja, origami, rickshaw, samurai, sayonara, sudoku, sumo, sushi, tsunami, tycoon have become part of the English language.

Information: Wikipedia