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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 .
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.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [1] ... Japan: 15 4 19 0.27 129,414,863 8,627,658 5,050
Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o-or go-as a prefix. o-is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go-is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal ...
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. [4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5] There are also difficulties in ...
In terms of mutual intelligibility, a survey in 1967 found the four most unintelligible dialects (excluding Ryūkyūan languages and Tohoku dialects) to students from Greater Tokyo are the Kiso dialect (in the deep mountains of Nagano Prefecture), the Himi dialect (in Toyama Prefecture), the Kagoshima dialect and the Maniwa dialect (in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture). [8]
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 .
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.