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The oral languages spoken by the native peoples of the insular country of Japan at present and during recorded history belong to either of two primary phyla of human language: Japonic languages. Japanese language (See also Japanese dialects) Hachijō Japanese; Eastern Japanese; Western Japanese; Kyūshū Japanese; Ryūkyūan languages
Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language. This is a significant increase from before World War II ; in 1940, only 65 Americans not of Japanese descent were able to read, write and understand the language.
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
English has taken a major role in Japan as a business and international link language, and is a compulsory subject at the junior and senior high school levels. [257] Japanese Sign Language is the primary sign language used in Japan and has gained some official recognition, but its usage has been historically hindered by discriminatory policies ...
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.
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.
A language that uniquely represents the national identity of a state, nation, and/or country and is so designated by a country's government; some are technically minority languages. (On this page a national language is followed by parentheses that identify it as a national language status.) Some countries have more than one language with this ...
The Western Japanese Kansai dialect was the prestige dialect when Kyoto was the capital, and Western forms are found in literary language as well as in honorific expressions of modern Tokyo dialect (and therefore Standard Japanese), such as adverbial ohayō gozaimasu (not *ohayaku), the humble existential verb oru, and the polite negative ...