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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 .
The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called yamato kotoba (大和言葉 or infrequently 大和詞, i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wago (和語 ...
The Japanese language is Japan's de facto national language and the primary written and spoken language of most people in the country. [255] Japanese writing uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on cursive script and radicals used by kanji), as well as the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. [256]
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.
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]
While Japanese is the only official language of Japan, other languages such as Ainu [16] and Ryukyuan [17] are spoken on the Japanese islands. Written Japanese uses a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters pronounced as "kanji" (漢字) in Japanese, hiragana, and katakana.
The Tokyo dialect (Tōkyō hōgen, Tōkyō-ben, Tōkyō-go (東京方言, 東京弁, 東京語)) is a variety of Japanese language spoken in modern Tokyo. As a whole, it is generally considered to be Standard Japanese, though specific aspects of slang or pronunciation can vary by area and social class. Yamanote (red) and Shitamachi (blue)
Main menu. Main menu. move to sidebar hide. ... This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue ... Japan: 15 4 19