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While Japanese is unquestionably a member of this Japonic language family, which consists of two Japanese languages (Japanese itself and the moribund Hachijō language) and four or five relatively closely related Ryūkyūan languages (Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, and possibly Yonaguni), attempts have also been made to establish a genetic ...
- Overview
- Hypotheses of genetic affiliation
- Dialects
- Literary history
Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in...
Click Here to see full-size tableJapanese is the only major language whose genetic affiliation is not known. The hypothesis relating Japanese to Korean remains the strongest, but other hypotheses also have been advanced. Some attempt to relate Japanese to the language groups of South Asia such as the Austronesian, the Austroasiatic, and the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, efforts were focused more on the origins of the Japanese language than on its genetic affiliation per se; specifically, linguists attempted to reconcile some conflicting linguistic traits.
An increasingly popular theory along that line posits that the mixed nature of Japanese results from its Austronesian lexical substratum and the Altaic grammatical superstratum. According to one version of that hypothesis, a language of southern origin with a phonological system like those of Austronesian languages was spoken in Japan during the prehistoric Jōmon era (c. 10,500 to c. 300 bce). As the Yayoi culture was introduced to Japan from the Asian continent about 300 bce, a language of southern Korea began to spread eastward from the southern island of Kyushu along with that culture, which also introduced to Japan iron and bronze implements and the cultivation of rice. Because the migration from Korea did not take place on a large scale, the new language did not eradicate certain older lexical items, though it was able to change the grammatical structure of the existing language. Thus, that theory maintains, Japanese must be said to be genetically related to Korean (and perhaps ultimately to Altaic languages), though it contains Austronesian lexical residues. The Altaic theory, however, is not widely accepted.
The country’s geography, characterized by high mountain peaks and deep valleys as well as by small isolated islands, has fostered the development of various dialects throughout the archipelago. Different dialects are often mutually unintelligible; the speakers of the Kagoshima dialect of Kyushu are not understood by the majority of the people of the main island of Honshu. Likewise, northern dialect speakers from such places as Aomori and Akita are not understood by most people in metropolitan Tokyo or anywhere in western Japan. Japanese dialectologists agree that a major dialect boundary separates Okinawan dialects of the Ryukyu Islands from the rest of the mainland dialects. The latter are then divided into either three groups—Eastern, Western, and Kyushu dialects—or simply Eastern and Western dialects, the latter including the Kyushu group. Linguistic unification has been achieved by the spread of the kyōtsū-go “common language,” which is based on the Tokyo dialect. A standardized written language has been a feature of compulsory education, which started in 1886. Modern mobility and mass media also have helped to level dialectal differences and have had a strong effect on the accelerated rate of the loss of local dialects.
Britannica Quiz
Written records of Japanese date to the 8th century, the oldest among them being the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”). If the history of the language were to be split in two, the division would fall somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, when the language shed most of its Old Japanese characteristics and acquired those of the mode...
- Masayoshi Shibatani
Since Japanese cannot be easily proven to belong to any language family, most scholars consider it a language isolate. The only languages that Japanese is related to are the languages spoken in Ryukyu islands lying South–Southwest of Japan, but the linguistic affiliation of the Ryukyuan languages is not known either.
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.
Dec 1, 2020 · In every language but Japanese, wordforms in the artificial lexica (shown by violin plots) have more homophones (Mean Number of Homophones) on average than wordforms in the real lexica (shown by orange dots).
- Sean Trott, Benjamin Bergen
- 2020
Sep 27, 2024 · Japanese religion, the religious beliefs and practices of the Japanese people. There is no single dominant religion in Japan. Several religious and quasi-religious systems, including Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism, exist side by side, and plurality of religious affiliation is common in Japan.
Oct 13, 1999 · Japanese is written using two systems of orthography, Chinese characters and syllabaries. Chinese characters, or kanji, were brought in from China starting about 1,500 years ago. Prior to their introduction, Japanese was strictly a spoken language.
