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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 ...
Languages of Japan. The most widely spoken language in Japan is Japanese, which is separated into several dialects with Tokyo dialect considered Standard Japanese . In addition to the Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the ...
Japanese is the national and primary language of Japan. The language is a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Early Japanese is known primarily by its state in the 8th century when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled. The earliest attestation of the Japanese language was found in a Chinese document from 256 CE.
Japonic languages and dialects. 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 ...
The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands— Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu —and thousands of smaller islands, covering 377,975 square kilometres (145,937 sq mi). With a population of more than 125 million as of 2020, Japan is the 11th most populous country. Tokyo is its capital and largest city.
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 ...
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 now, Japanese is classified as a member of the Japonic languages or as a language isolate with no ...
The dialects (方言, hōgen) of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including modern capital Tokyo) and Western (including old capital Kyoto ), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches, the latter perhaps the most divergent of all. [1]