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Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [ɲihoŋɡo] ⓘ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 120 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages ...
Old Japanese (上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family.
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. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and significant progress has been made in ...
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.
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 .
Rōmaji. Cyrillization. v. t. e. The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [1] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji (ローマ字, lit. 'Roman letters', [ɾoːma (d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ (d)ʑi]). Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic ...
The modern Japanese language has a tripartite writing system using hiragana, katakana and kanji. The language includes native Japanese words and a large number of words derived from the Chinese language. In Japan the adult literacy rate in the Japanese language exceeds 99%. [37] Dozens of Japanese dialects are spoken in regions of Japan. For ...
The classification of the Japonic languages and their external relations is unclear. Linguists traditionally consider the Japonic languages to belong to an independent family; indeed, until the classification of Ryukyuan and eventually Hachijō as separate languages within a Japonic family rather than as dialects of Japanese, Japanese was considered a language isolate.