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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
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 ...
In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with さっか, sakka, "author". However, it cannot be used to double an n – for this purpose, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable, as in みんな ( minna , "all").
English: Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart: a concise summary of Japanese verb conjugation, handily formatted to fit onto one sheet of A4. Also includes irregulars, adjectives and confusing verbs. Also includes irregulars, adjectives and confusing verbs.
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 ...
Japanese is the de facto national language of Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese, which was recorded using Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries. [13] It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. [14]
Their languages comprise the Ryukyuan languages, [11] one of the two branches of the Japonic language family (the other being Japanese and its dialects). [12] The Ryukyuans have a distinct culture with some matriarchal elements, native religion , and cuisine which had fairly late (12th century) introduction of rice .
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.