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General information regarding Japanese

There are around 127 million people who speak Japanese worldwide. This naturally includes Japan, but also Japanese emigrants who are located in all corners of the globe. Japanese is a so-called agglutinative language and has a complex system of formalities, which express the hierarchical relationships within Japanese society and the relative relationships between internal discussion partners.

The Japanese vocabulary has been strongly influenced by Chinese during the past 1500 years. The Japanese script is a mixture of Kanji – characters copied from Chinese – and Hiragana and Katakana, which are based on syllables. Japanese is one of two languages in the Japanese Ryukyuan language family – the other language in this family is Ryukyuan, which is spoken on the Ryukyu Islands. We still aren’t sure about the origins of this language family. Japanese shows links and similarities with other languages in many different areas. Here are the most frequently proclaimed theories: - Japanese is related to a now extinct language, which used to be spoken in Korea and Manchuria; Japanese is related to Korean; Japanese is one of the Altaic languages, which followers of this theory also believe to include Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish and Korean; Japanese is a Creole language, possibly with Austronesian influences; Japanese is a purely Austronesian language; Japanese is related to Tamil.

Geographic expansion of Japanese

When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China and various different islands in the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War, the people living in those areas were forced to learn Japanese. A direct result of this is that there are still people there today who speak Japanese in addition to their own country’s language. Japanese emigrants across the word still often speak Japanese as their first language and still use Japanese in their everyday lives. The biggest concentration of Japanese emigrants can be found in Brazil, followed by Australia and the United States, where the main concentration can be found in California and Hawaii. However, the second generation of emigrants rarely speak fluent Japanese.

The Japanese script

Japanese did not have its own script before the fifth century. After the Japanese had become acquainted with the Chinese culture via Korean monks and scholars, they took over the Chinese script, in addition to other Chinese cultural aspects. Their own Japanese script was developed from this over the course of time. The Chinese characters were used to write Chinese loan words or Japanese words with the same meaning. Word endings and expressions with a grammatical function were also written in this Kanji script, until the two writing systems, Hiragana and Katakana, which were based on syllables, were developed. Nowadays endings and grammatical parts of sentences are written in Hiragana. Japanese students are taught the Kanji script during the first school year. They will be taught the 1945 most important characters for the remainder of their time at school, in the canon set by Japanese ministry of education.