Japanese language
What is the Japonic language family?
What are the main varieties of Japanese?
When did Japanese written records first appear?
Japanese language, language of the Japonic language family and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 125 million speakers in the early 2020s. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in North and South America, who have varying degrees of proficiency in Japanese. Since the mid-20th century, no country other than Japan has used Japanese as a first or a second language.
General considerations
Relationships to other languages
Japanese comprises all local language varieties spoken on Japan’s main islands (except for the unrelated Ainu languages). Together with the Ryukyuan languages—Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni—and possibly the Hachijō language, these mainland Japanese dialects form the Japonic language family. A number of language fragments from the Korean Peninsula are likely related to Japanese, suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages may have been spoken in the region. Most linguists believe that Japonic emerged in Japan during the Yayoi period (c. 300 bce–c. 250 ce), but it remains unclear if Japonic grew solely out of the language of the Yayoi immigrants, replacing the earlier language, or if the language of the Yayoi culture combined with the earlier language to form Japonic (see also creole languages).
A number of attempts have been made to relate Japonic to broader language families. One hypothesis, first put forth in the early 20th century, suggests a relationship between Japanese and the Austronesian languages. In the latter part of the 20th century a number of linguists posited a genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese. A number of them further argued that the two languages shared a genetic relationship with the Altaic languages, constituting a language family often termed Macro-Altaic. Some scholars have attempted to reconcile the possible Austronesian and Altaic origins of Japanese. They argue that a language with a phonological system like those of Austronesian was brought to Japan by the immigrants of the prehistoric Jōmon era (c. 10,500 to c. 300 bce) and that this language formed a linguistic substratum as it mixed with the language of the Yayoi culture, thought to be a form of Altaic by some who promote this hypothesis.
However, none of these hypotheses have gained widespread agreement. A number of linguists have critiqued the connection between Japonic and Austronesian languages arguing that connections between words in the two languages are tenuous. In the 21st century scholars increasingly reject the genetic relationship between Altaic languages as a whole. Some scholars continue to argue for the genetic relationship between Japanese and Korean, while others consider the similarities to be the result of language contact.
Dialects
The country’s geography, characterized by high mountain peaks and deep valleys as well as by small isolated islands, has fostered the development of various dialects throughout the archipelago. Different dialects are often mutually unintelligible; the speakers of the Kagoshima dialect of Kyushu are not understood by the majority of the people of the main island of Honshu. Likewise, northern dialect speakers from such places as Aomori and Akita are not understood by most people in metropolitan Tokyo or anywhere in western Japan. Japanese dialectologists agree that a major dialect boundary separates Okinawan dialects of the Ryukyu Islands from the rest of the mainland dialects. The latter are then divided into either three groups—Eastern, Western, and Kyushu dialects—or simply Eastern and Western dialects, the latter including the Kyushu group. Linguistic unification has been achieved by the spread of the kyōtsū-go “common language,” which is based on the Tokyo dialect. A standardized written language has been a feature of compulsory education, which started in 1886. Modern mobility and mass media also have helped to level dialectal differences and have had a strong effect on the accelerated rate of the loss of local dialects.
Literary history
Written records of Japanese date to the 8th century, the oldest among them being the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”). If the history of the language were to be split in two, the division would fall somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, when the language shed most of its Old Japanese characteristics and acquired those of the modern language. It is common, however, to divide the 1,200-year history into four or five periods; Old Japanese (up to the 8th century), Late Old Japanese (9th–11th century), Middle Japanese (12th–16th century), Early Modern Japanese (17th–18th century), and Modern Japanese (19th century to the present).
Grammatical structure
Through the centuries, Japanese grammatical structure has remained remarkably stable, to the degree that with some basic training in the grammar of classical Japanese, modern readers can readily appreciate such classical literature as the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), an anthology of Japanese verse; the Tosa nikki (935; The Tosa Diary); and the Genji monogatari (c. 1010; The Tale of Genji). Despite that stability, however, a number of features distinguish Old Japanese from Modern Japanese.
Phonology
Old Japanese is widely believed to have had eight vowels; in addition to the five vowels in modern use, /i, e, a, o, u/, the existence of three additional vowels /ï, ë, ö/ is assumed for Old Japanese. Some maintain, however, that Old Japanese had only five vowels and attribute the differences in vowel quality to the preceding consonants. There is also some indication that Old Japanese had a remnant form of vowel harmony. (Vowel harmony is said to exist when certain vowels call for other specific vowels within a certain domain, generally, within a word.) The wholesale shift of p to h (and to w between vowels) also took place relatively early, such that Modern Japanese has no native or Sino-Japanese word that begins with p. The remnant forms with the original p are seen among some Okinawan dialects; e.g., Okinawan pi ‘fire’ and pana ‘flower’ correspond to the Tokyo forms hi and hana.