# Japanese/Introduction

Japanese is spoken by 130 million people. This makes it the ninth most
spoken language by
native speakers. Linguists debate over the classification of the
Japanese language, and one general theory asserts that Japanese is an
isolated language and thus a language family of its own, known as
Japonic languages. Another major theory includes Japanese as part of a
hypothetical Altaic language family which spans most of Central Asia and
would also include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean languages.
Neither of these theories has yet been generally accepted.

Japan is the only country where Japanese is the sole official language
(though the island of Angaur has Japanese as one
of three official languages). There are, however, numerous speakers in
other countries. These are largely due to emigration, most notably to
the United States of America (California and Hawaii, in particular),
Brazil and the Philippines. Furthermore, when Japan occupied and
colonized much of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, the locals
were educated in the Japanese language. Many elderly locals in Korea,
Taiwan, and parts of China still speak Japanese.

Japan has steadily developed for many centuries and, unlike many other
cultures, has not been seriously affected by any major invasions until
recent times. A substantial part of the vocabulary, though, has been
borrowed over the years from Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, German, French,
and most recently English.

## Grammar

While Japanese grammar is very regular, it is markedly different from
English. Japanese has been deemed a subject--object--verb (SOV) and
topic-prominent language, whereas English is a subject--verb--object
(SVO) and subject-prominent language.

To illustrate, the English sentence "Cats eat mice" contains a subject
(cats), a verb (eat), and an object (mice), in an SVO order, where the
"-s" is a *plural marker*, and "mouse" → "mice" is a plural marker by
ablaut, but only the word order indicates which
is the subject and the object---i.e. which is dining and which is the
meal.

+-------------------+----+---------------------+----+-------------------+
| Japanese culture and society is based on a hierarchy of higher status
(目上 *meue*) and lower status (目下 *meshita*). As such, there are
three varying levels of politeness. Because Japanese is primarily a
\"vertical\" society, all relationships contain an element of relative
station. For example, a student is a lower station than a teacher, and
therefore a student would use polite language when speaking to a
teacher, but the teacher would use plain language when speaking to a
student. A salesperson talking to a customer would place himself/herself
far below the customer, and would therefore use honorific language,
whereas the customer would use either plain or polite language.

Honorific language is not a separate category from plain and polite
language, but a separate concept that uses different rules. When using
honorific language, a Japanese speaker modifies nouns, verbs, and
adjectives to either lower himself/herself and their associates, or
exalt someone else and that individual\'s associates. Whereas the use of
plain or polite language is determined by the relative station of the
person *to* whom you are speaking, the use of honorific language is
determined by the relative station of the person *about* whom you are
speaking. Exalted language is applied when you are speaking about
someone who is due respect, such as a professor, an executive, a
political official, or a customer. Exalted language is only applied to
other people, never to oneself. Humble language, however, is *only*
applied to oneself and people associated with oneself. It would be
inappropriate, for example, to use humble language to describe a beggar,
even though they would be extremely low on the social ladder.

## The Japanese writing system

Japanese is written mostly using three writing scripts, *kanji*,
*hiragana* and *katakana*. Kanji are Chinese characters that were first
introduced to Japan in the 4th century. Unlike Chinese, Japanese is a
highly inflected language with words changing their ending depending on
case, number, etc. For this reason, the hiragana and katakana
syllabaries were created. The hiragana serve largely to show the
inflection of words, as conjunctions and such. The katakana are mainly
used for loan-words from other languages.

### Kanji

The Japanese writing system is derived from the Chinese ideographic
character set (Japanese: 漢字 *kanji*, Mandarin: 汉字 *hanzi*). They are
usually very similar to Traditional Chinese characters. Though kanji are
Chinese in origin their use is dictated by Japanese grammar. Each
character may be read in different ways depending on the context it is
in.

The number of existing Chinese characters has been variously estimated
at between 40,000 and 80,000; however, only a small subset is commonly
used in modern Japanese. An educated Japanese person will generally be
able to read between 2,000 and 4,000 characters. In order to be literate
in the Japanese language, the student should strive to master at least
the 2,136 general-use characters (常用漢字 -- *jōyō
kanji*) established by the Ministry of
Education.

### Hiragana and katakana

The syllabaries, known as *kana* (),
were developed around 900 AD by simplifying kanji to form the *hiragana*
(ひらがな, or 平仮名) and the more angular *katakana* (カタカナ, or
片仮名). Hiragana can be recognized by the characteristic curved shapes,
while katakana are identifiable by their sharp edges and straight lines.
The creation of one of the scripts has been attributed to Kūkai
(774-835, alias Kōbō Daishi) the famous monk who introduced Shingon
Buddhism to Japan.

Hiragana and katakana are almost completely phonetic---much more so than
the English alphabet. Each set, however, is referred to as a *syllabary*
rather than an alphabet because each character represents an entire
syllable with only a single consonant (which is a more recent addition)
(see ../Pronunciation/ for more). The
syllabary charts in Japanese are referred to as the *gojūon*
(), meaning \"fifty sounds\"
because they are written in a five by ten chart. However, there are a
few gaps in the table where certain sounds have fallen out of use.
Modern Japanese can be written using 46 kana.

In practical use, hiragana is used to write, for example,
inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs
(送り仮名 *okurigana*), grammatical particles (助詞 *joshi*) and
auxiliaries (助動詞 *jodōshi*), Japanese words that have no kanji (or
not commonly known kanji), and annotations to kanji to indicate
pronunciation (振り仮名 *furigana*). Katakana is used to write, for
example, foreign words and names,
onomatopoeia, emphasized words (somewhat
like italicized words in English text), and technical and scientific
words, such as plant, animal, and mineral names.

Contents

## References


[^1]: 「食べる」
