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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 Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa Prefecture and the southern islands of Kagoshima Prefecture form a separate branch of the Japonic family, and are not Japanese dialects, although they are sometimes referred to as such. The setting of Japan with its numerous islands and mountains has the ideal setting for developing many dialects. [2]
In addition to these two indigenous language families, there is Japanese Sign Language, as well as significant minorities of ethnic Koreans and Chinese, who make up respectively about 0.5% and 0.4% of the country's population and many of whom continue to speak their ethnic language in private (see Zainichi Korean).
Although Kunrei-shiki romanization is the style favored by the Japanese government, Hepburn remains the most popular method of Japanese romanization. It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.
Kunrei-shiki romanization (Japanese: 訓令式ローマ字, Hepburn: Kunrei-shiki rōmaji), also known as the Monbusho system (named after the endonym for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) or MEXT system, [1] is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet.
This is a simplified table of Japanese kanji visual components that does away with all the archaic forms found in the Japanese version of the Kangxi radicals.. The 214 Kanji radicals are technically classifiers as they are not always etymologically correct, [1] but since linguistics uses that word in the sense of "classifying" nouns (such as in counter words), dictionaries commonly call the ...
At the time, documents were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan. Although generally agreed among linguists to be a distinct language, most Japanese, as well as some Okinawans, tend to think of Okinawan as merely a regional dialect of Japanese , even though it is not intelligible to monolingual Japanese speakers. [ 1 ]
The kyōiku kanji (教育漢字, literally "education kanji") are kanji which Japanese elementary school students should learn from first through sixth grade. [1] Also known as gakushū kanji (学習漢字, literally "learning kanji"), these kanji are listed on the Gakunenbetsu kanji haitō hyō (学年別漢字配当表(), literally "table of kanji by school year"), [2].