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Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [ɲihoŋɡo] ⓘ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 120 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages ...
The word Japan is an exonym, and is used (in one form or another) by many languages. The Japanese names for Japan are Nihon ( にほん ⓘ) and Nippon ( にっぽん ⓘ ). They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本 . During the third-century CE Three Kingdoms period, Japan was inhabited by the Yayoi people who lived in Kyushu up ...
Languages of Japan. The most widely spoken language in Japan is Japanese, which is separated into several dialects with Tokyo dialect considered Standard Japanese . In addition to the Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the ...
The Japanese language is Japan's de facto national language and the primary written and spoken language of most people in the country. [252] Japanese writing uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on cursive script and radicals used by kanji), as well as the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. [253]
Japanese is the national and primary language of Japan. The language is a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Early Japanese is known primarily by its state in the 8th century when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled. The earliest attestation of the Japanese language was found in a Chinese document from 256 CE.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Japonic languages and dialects. Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan ( Japanese: 日琉語族, romanized : Nichiryū gozoku ), sometimes also Japanic, [1] is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...
The dialects (方言, hōgen) of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including modern capital Tokyo) and Western (including old capital Kyoto ), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches, the latter perhaps the most divergent of all. [ 1]