Japanese
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
No law makes Nihongo official in Japan; it is the national language in practice only. Japanese heads the Japonic family, which also holds the Ryukyuan languages, and it is written in a mix of Chinese kanji and two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. The page lists 2 countries because a Palauan state constitution names it too.
The language on record
- Own name
- 日本語
- ISO 639-1
- JA
- ISO 639-3
- JPN
- Script
- Japanese
- Family
- Japonic
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Japanese is official
Japan, where its status is de facto, and Palau, whose state of Angaur named Japanese an official language beside Palauan and English in its 1982 constitution.
Official beside Japanese
About Japanese
How the Tokyo standard replaced Kansai speech
Chinese documents of the 3rd century record a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts appear only in the 8th century. Sino-Japanese vocabulary poured in from the Heian period (794 to 1185), and Late Middle Japanese (1185 to 1600) brought large grammatical changes and the first European loanwords. In the early modern period the basis of the standard moved from Kansai to Edo, now Tokyo. Hyōjungo, standard Japanese, grew after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 from the speech of Tokyo's upper-class districts, and it is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications.
Why Japanese needs three scripts
Writing reached Japan from China by way of Baekje before the 5th century. Hiragana and katakana were both simplified from kanji; hiragana, emerging around the 9th century, was at first used mainly by women and was in general use by the 10th. Kanji carry the stems of words, but they cannot change form, so hiragana are added to show verb and adjective endings. After the Second World War the occupation considered abolishing kanji for rōmaji, and the jōyō kanji list came as a compromise: pupils learn 1,006 characters by the end of primary school and 2,136 in all.
Which dialects Tokyo students could not follow
A 1967 survey played recordings to Keio University students raised in Kantō. The hardest dialects for them were those of Kiso in Nagano, Himi in Toyama, Kagoshima and Maniwa in Okayama. Hachijō-jima keeps a dialect descended from Eastern Old Japanese. The Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa and Amami form a separate Japonic branch that Japanese speakers cannot understand, though many Japanese call them dialects.
What happened to Japanese in Angaur
Palau was under Japanese rule as the South Seas Mandate, and the 1958 census of the Trust Territory found that 89% of Palauans born between 1914 and 1933 could speak and read Japanese. Elders schooled in Japanese took part in drafting Angaur's 1982 constitution. By the 2005 Palau census, no resident of Angaur reported speaking Japanese at home.
Common questions
Questions about Japanese
Is Japanese related to Korean?
No link has won wide acceptance. Proposals tying the Japonic family to Korean, Ainu, Austronesian or the discredited Altaic grouping have all failed to convince most linguists.
What is the basic word order of Japanese?
Subject, object, verb, with particles marking what each word does in the sentence. Nouns carry no number or gender, and there are no articles.
What is bungo?
The literary language used for formal writing until about 1900, with its own grammar. Everyday kōgo gradually replaced it by the 1940s, though many laws that survived the Second World War are still written in bungo.
Why were some children's names refused registration?
Names must use characters from approved lists. The list of name characters was first set at 92 in 1951; after popular pressure and a court ruling it grew to 983 by 2004.