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For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. 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 ...
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 countries by number of languages according to the 22nd ... Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world. [2 ... Japan: 15 4 19 ...
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.
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 obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift .
Japan dropped from the 5th most populous country in the world to 6th in 1964, 7th in 1978, 8th in 1990, to 9th in 1998, to 10th in the early 21st century, 11th in 2020, and to 12th in 2023. [13] [14] Over the period of 2010 to 2015, the population shrank by almost a million, [15] and Japan lost a half-million in 2022 alone. [16]
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 most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia , such as Chinese , Persian , Sanskrit , Arabic , Tamil or Telugu , have a long history as a written language.