Japanese

Tania Patricia Alfaro Campos

• Japanese (日本語 ) is anEast Asian language spokenby about 125 millionspeakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the nationallanguage. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) languagefamily, whose relation toother language groups, particularly to Korean and the suggested Altaiclanguage family, is debated.

• 1 History– 1.2 Old Japanese– 1.5 Modern Japanese

• 2 Geographic distribution– 2.2 Dialects

• 3 Classification– 3.2 Altaic hypothesis

• 4 Phonology• 5 Grammar

– 5.1 Sentence structure– 5.2 Inflection and conjugation– 5.3 Politeness

• 6 Vocabulary• 7 Writing system• 8 Study by non-native speakers

History• Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of

the Japanese language. Through the spread of Buddhism, the Chinese writing system was imported to Japan.

• Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period in 1600. Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto.

Geographic distribution• Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in

Japan, it has been spoken outside. Before and during World War II, when Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, the Philippines, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries learned Japanese as the language of the empire. As a result, many elderly people in these countries can still speak Japanese.

• Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to many factors, including the length of time the archipelago has been inhabited, its mountainous island terrain, and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation.

Classification

• Japanese is a member of the Japonic languages family, which also includes the languages spoken throughout the Ryūkyū Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is often called a language isolate.

• The proposed Altaic family of languages, which would include languages from far eastern Europe to northeastern Asia, has had its supporters and detractors over its history.

Phonology

• All Japanese vowels are pure—that is, there are no diphthongs, only monophthongs. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel /ɯ/ which is like /u/, but compressed instead of rounded.

• The "r" of the Japanese language (technically a lateral apical post alveolar flap), is of particular interest, sounding to most English speakers to be something between an "l" and a retroflex "r" depending on its position in a word. The "g" is also notable; unless it starts a sentence, it is pronounced /ŋ/, like the ng in "sing," in the Kanto prestige dialect and in other eastern dialects.

Grammar

• The basic sentence structure is topic–comment. For example, Kochira wa Tanaka-san desu (こちらは田中さんです).kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa. Theverb de aru (desu is a contraction of its politeform de arimasu) is a copula, commonlytranslated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"), though technically it holds no meaning and isused to give a sentence 'politeness'.

• This is partly because these words evolvedfrom regular nouns, such as kimi "you" (君 "lord"), anata "you" (あなた"that side, yonder"), and boku "I" (僕 "servant"). This iswhy some linguists do not classify Japanese"pronouns" as pronouns, but rather as referential nouns, much likeSpanish usted (contracted from vuestra merced, "your (flatteringmajestic) grace") orPortuguese o senhor. Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situationsrequiring special emphasis as to who is doingwhat to whom.

• Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect. The noun hon (本) may refer to a single book or several books; hito (人) can mean "person" or "people"; and ki (木) can be "tree" or "trees". Where number is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity (often with a counter word) or (rarely) by adding a suffix, or sometimes by duplication (e.g.人人, hitobito, usually written with an iteration mark as人々). Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus Tanaka-san usually means Mr./Ms. Tanaka.

• Questions (both with an interrogativepronoun and yes/no questions) have the samestructure as affirmative sentences, but withintonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle -ka is added. For example,ii desu (いいです) "It is OK" becomes ii desu-ka (いいですか。) "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes theparticle -no (の) is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: Dōshitekonai-no? "Why aren't (you) coming?".

• The Japanese language can express differing levels in social status. The differences in social position are determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other person might use a plainer form.

Vocabulary

• The original language of Japan, or at least theoriginal language of a certain population thatwas ancestral to a significant portion of thehistorical and present Japanese nation, wasthe so-called yamato kotoba (大和言葉 orinfrequently大和詞, i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimesreferred to as wago (和語 or rarely倭語, i.e.the "Wa words").