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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]
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).
A number of sign languages are spoken throughout Asia. These include the Japanese Sign Language family, Chinese Sign Language, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language, as well as a number of small indigenous sign languages of countries such as Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. Many official sign languages are part of the French Sign Language family.
Japanese is the de facto national language of Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese, which was recorded using Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries. [13] It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. [14]
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango (Japanese: 漢語, pronounced, "Han words"), is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Most Sino-Japanese words were borrowed in the 5th–9th centuries AD, from Early Middle Chinese into Old Japanese. Some grammatical ...
Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, ⓘ) 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.
A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-48880-8. Kupchik, John E. (2011). A grammar of the Eastern Old Japanese dialects (PDF) (PhD thesis). Hawaii: University of Hawaii. Kupchik, John E. (2013). On the orthography and phonetics of the Azuma Old Japanese dialects.
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