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| Japanese (日本語, Nihongo) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Japan, Hawaii, Brazil, Guam, Marshall Islands, Palau, Taiwan |
| Region: | East Asia, Oceania |
| Total speakers: | 127 million |
| Ranking: | 9 |
| Genetic classification: | Japonic languages or a language isolate |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Japan (de facto), Angaur (Palau) |
| Regulated by: | Japanese Government |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639 | ja |
| ISO 639-2 | jpn |
| SIL | JPN |
| See also: Language – List of languages | |
Japanese (Japanese: 日本語, Nihongo ▶(?)) is a language of unknown origins spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verbal forms which indicate the relative status of the speaker to the listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically-distinctive pitch accent system.
Though the two languages are completely unrelated, Japanese has been heavily influenced by Chinese over a period of at least 1,500 years. Japanese is written with a mix of Chinese characters (kanji) and a modified syllabary, kana, also originally based on Chinese characters. Much vocabulary has been imported from Chinese, or created on Chinese models.
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Classification
Historical linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, but do not agree further about the origins of the language. An older view, still widely held by non-specialists, is that Japanese is a language isolate.
As for its relation to other languages, there are several competing theories (presented roughly in descending order of likelihood):
- Japanese is a relative of extinct languages spoken by historic cultures in what are now the Korean peninsula and Manchuria. The best attested of these is the language of Goguryeo (a.k.a. Koguryo), with the more poorly-attested languages of Baekje (a.k.a. Paekche) and Buyeo (a.k.a Puyo) hypothesized to also be related. The limited data on these languages, as well as these cultures' historic ties, are the primary evidence.
- Japanese is a relative of other Asian languages. This theory maintains that Japanese is related to other East Asian languages such as Korean (and possibly the Sino-Tibetan languages).
- Japanese is a relative of the Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish, and sometimes, Korean. Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that like Turkish and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language. Additionally, there are a suggestive number of apparently regular correspondences in basic vocabulary, such as ishi "stone" to Turkic daş, yon "four" to Turkic dört.
- Phonological and lexical similarities to Austronesian languages have been noted.
- Japanese is a kind of creole, with an Altaic substratum and an Austronesian superstratum, or vice versa. It has an Altaic grammatical substructure, and core Austronesian vocabulary.
- Japanese is related to southern Asian languages. Ono Susumu has suggested a possible relationship between Japanese and Tamil, a member of the Dravidian language family spoken in southern India.
Specialists in Japanese historical linguistics all agree that Japanese is related to the Ryukyuan languages (including Okinawan); together, Japanese and Ryukyuan are grouped in the Japonic languages. Among these specialists, the possibility of a genetic relation to Goguryeo has the most evidence; relationship to Korean is considered plausible but is still up to debate; the Altaic hypothesis has somewhat less currency. Almost all specialists reject the idea that Japanese could be related to Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian languages or Sino-Tibetan languages, and the idea that Japanese could be related to Tamil is given no credence at all.
It should be noted that linguistic studies, like all fields, can be strongly affected by national politics and other non-academic factors. For example, some linguists would say that Dutch is a dialect of German but is known as a language for political reasons. Japan's long-standing rivalries and enmities with virtually all of its neighbours make the study of linguistic connection particularly fraught with such political tensions. However, these tensions are less prevalent among non-Japanese researchers.
Geographic distribution
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programmes. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in Brazil, where the biggest Japanese community outside Japan is found, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne), the United States (notably California and Hawaii), also frequently speak Japanese. There is also a small community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.
Official status
Japanese is the de facto official language of Japan, and Japan is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyōjungo 標準語 or standard Japanese, and kyōtsūgo 共通語 or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.
Because Japanese is spoken almost only by the Japanese, it is heavily tied to Japanese culture. Like most languages, Japanese has words for cultural ideas, traditions and customs that have no simple equivalent in other languages. For example, wa, nemawashi, kaizen, and seppuku.
Dialects
Main article: Japanese dialects
There are dozens of dialects spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to the mountainous island terrain and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, particle usage, and pronunciation. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.
Dialects from less central regions, such as the Tōhoku or Tsushima dialect may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The dialect used in Kagoshima in southern Kyūshū is famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyūshū as well. Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect.
The Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the islands of Okinawa Prefecture. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages. Due to the close relationship of Ryukyuan and Japanese, they are still sometimes said to be only dialects of one language, but modern scholars consider them to be separate languages.
Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide, due not only to TV and radio, but also to increased mobility within Japan due to its system of roads, railways, and airports. Young people usually speak their local dialect and the standard language, though in most cases, the local dialect is influenced by the standard, and regional versions of "standard" Japanese have local-dialect influence.
Sounds
- Main article: Japanese phonology
| Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
Japanese vowels are "pure" sounds, similar to their Italian or Spanish counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel /ɯ/, which is like /u/, but unrounded. Japanese has five vowels (each one with short and long versions).
Some Japanese consonants have several allophones, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. Most instances of allophony are caused by palatalization (for example, /ti/ is pronounced tɕi, approximately chi).
The syllabic structure and the phonotactics are very simple; no consonant clusters are allowed within a syllable, and almost none within the word.
Grammar
Main article: Japanese grammar
The basic Japanese word order is Subject Object Verb. Subject and object are usually marked by particles which come after the word.
The basic sentence structure is topic-comment. For example, Kochira wa Tanaka san desu. Kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa. The verb is desu ("be"). As a phrase, Tanaka san desu is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". Thus Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it indicates the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. For example, the sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai. literally means, "As for elephants, the nose is long." The topic is zō "elephant," and the subject is hana "nose."
Most Japanese nouns have neither number nor gender. Thus hon may mean "book" and "books". It is possible to explicitly indicate more than one, either by using numbers, often with a counter. Words for people are usually singular. Thus Tanaka san usually means Mr./Ms. Tanaka. They can be made plural with noun suffixes that indicate groups, such as -tachi.
Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present, or non-past, which is used for the present and the future. For some verbs, that represent an ongoing process, the -te iru form indicates a continuous (or progressive) tense. For others, that represent a change of state, the -te iru form indicates a perfect tense. For example, kite iru means "He has come", but tabete iru means "He is eating".
Questions are formed by adding a question element to the end of the verb, usually ka. For example,
- Kore de ii desu. "This is OK."
becomes
- Kore de ii desu ka. "Is this OK?"
Negatives are formed from verb conjugations. For example,
- Daigaku ni iku. "Go to university.",
becomes
- Daigaku ni ikanai. "Don't go to university.",
with iku "to go" changing to the negative form ikanai.
The word desu/da is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English be, but often takes on other roles. A separate function of "to be" is to indicate existence, as in "there is", for which the verbs aru and iru are used for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example,
- Neko ga iru. "There's a cat.",
and
- Ii kangae ga nai. "I haven't got a good idea."
The verb "to do" (suru, polite form shimasu) is often used to make verbs from nouns (aisuru "to love", benkyō suru "to study", etc.). Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs (e.g. tobidasu "to fly out, to flee," from tobu "to fly, to jump" + dasu "to go out").
There are three types of adjective:
- keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i which can become, for example, past, or negative. For example atsui ("hot")
- atsui hi "a hot day".
- keiyōdōshi, or na adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula, usually na. For example hen (strange)
- hen na hito "a strange person".
- rentaishi, also called true adjectives, such as onaji "the same"
- onaji hi "the same day".
Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi may predicate sentences. For example,
- Gohan ga atsui. "The rice is hot."
- Kare wa hen da. "He's strange."
Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs. The rentaishi are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include ookina "big" and onaji "the same" (although there is a noun onaji that can be used as a predicate, as in onaji da).
Both keiyōdōshi and keiyōshi form adverbs, by following with ni in the case of keiyōdōshi:
- hen ni naru "become strange",
and by changing i to ku in the case of keiyōshi:
- atsuku naru "become hot".
The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include
- no for possession,
- watashi no kamera "my camera"
- ga for subject,
- Kare ga yatta. "He did it."
- o for direct object
- Nani o suru ka. "What do I do?"
- ni for indirect object,
- Tanaka san ni kiite "Ask Tanaka",
- wa for the topic
and many others.
Japanese has many words that are translated as pronouns in English, such as watashi or boku, both meaning "I". Which one of them is used depends upon many factors, including the sex and status of the speaker, and who is being spoken to, and the social setting. Their use is often optional, since Japanese is described as a so-called pro-drop language, i.e., one in which the subject of a sentence does not always need to be stated. For example, instead of saying
- Watashi wa byōki desu. "I am sick.",
if the speaker is understood to be the subject, one could simply say Byōki desu. A single verb can be a complete sentence:
- yatta! "(I / we / they / etc) did (it)!".
Politeness
Main articles: Japanese honorifics and also Japanese titles
Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.
Broadly speaking, there are three main politeness levels in spoken Japanese: the plain form (kudaketa 砕けた), the simple polite form (teineigo 丁寧語) and the advanced polite form (keigo 敬語).
Since most relationships are not equal in Japanese society, one person typically has a higher position. This position is 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 might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner. See uchi-soto
The plain form in Japanese is recognized by the shorter, so-called dictionary (jisho 辞書) form of verbs, and the da form of the copula. At the teinei level, verbs end with the helping verb -masu (-ます), and the copula desu (-です) is used. The advanced polite form, keigo, actually consists of two kinds of politeness: honorific language (sonkeigo) and humble (kenjōgo) language. Whereas teineigo is an inflectional system, keigo often employs many special (often irregular) honorific and humble verb forms.
The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and his group. For example, the -san (-さん) suffix ("Mr", "Mrs" or "Ms") is an example of honorific language. See Japanese titles. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's "group".
Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of お o- or ご go-; as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'rice, meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status, though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends. On the other hand, a female speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu merely to show politeness; this contrasts with the more abrupt speech of men (though men may also use very polite forms when speaking to superiors). See Japanese honorifics.
Many researchers report that since the 1990s, the use of polite forms has become rarer. Needless to say, many older people disapprove of this trend.
Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity. That is, they use polite forms for new acquaintances, but if a relationship becomes more intimate, they no longer use them. This occurs regardless of age, social class, or gender.
Young people usually receive extensive training in the "proper" use of polite language when they start to work for a company.
Vocabulary
Historically, Japanese has a large number of words that are borrowed from Korean, Ainu, and Chinese. Japan has also borrowed a number of words (gairaigo) from Portuguese in the 16th century, and then with the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowed from Dutch, and after the Meiji Restoration, from German, French, and most recently English.
In the Meiji era, the Japanese elite also coined many neologisms (in kanji; called wasei-kango) to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Korean elite re-imported many of these to Chinese and Korean via characters in the late 19th and early 20th century. These include 政治 seiji ("politics"), 化学 kagaku ("chemistry"), etc. As a result, Japanese, Chinese and Korean share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greco-Roman words is shared among European languages.
In the past few decades, wasei-eigo (made-in-Japan English) has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as wanpataan (AND1lt; one + pattern, "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and sukinshippu (AND1lt; skin + -ship, "physical contact"), although coined from English, are nonsensical in a non-Japanese context. A small number of such words, such as anime and cosplay, have been borrowed back into English.
Additionally, many native Japanese words have become commonplace in English, partly due to Japan's international prominence and also due to the popularity of many Japanese cultural exports. Words such as sushi, judo, karate, sumo, karaoke, origami, samurai, haiku, ninja, sayonara, rickshaw (from 人力車 jinrikisha), futon, bento, and many others have become an integral part of the English language.
Writing system
- Main article: Japanese writing system
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main scripts: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Roman alphabet (romaji) is also sometimes used.
Learning Japanese
Learning Japanese involves understanding grammar, pronunciation, the writing system, and acquiring adequate vocabulary. While the sound system is simple to master compared with those of other languages, the writing system may pose a challenge for those whose native language does not use Chinese characters. On the other hand one learns a lot about Japanese culture by studying kanji characters. Japanese students begin to learn kanji characters from their first grade of an elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the kyōiku kanji, specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 939 characters in a junior high school, which totally covers 1,945 jōyō kanji (common kanji) characters, which are usually considered sufficient for everyday life.
Japanese can be learned without studying Chinese characters. However, Japanese borrowed thousands upon thousands of words from Chinese, and for various reasons, many of these Chinese-based words are now homophones (words pronounced identically) in Japanese. This may make it necessary to learn the characters if one wants to learn an extended vocabulary, although blind Japanese people who cannot read any characters are able to function in the spoken language without problems, since most words, even if not written down, can be understood by the context. "Nihon" (にほん) can mean "two long, thin objects" (二本) as well as "Japan" (日本). However, these two words have different accents, and are distinct even in isolation.
Major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses. Moreover, South Korea, Australia, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark and some states of the United States provide the language course at high schools or lower level schools. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003. 900,000 South Koreans, 389,000 Chinese people, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans study Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. The Japanese government provides standard tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the Business Japanese Proficiency Test, to test ability to understand Japanese in a business setting.
In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. Furthermore, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including Japanese Brazilians and foreign wives married to Japanese nationals.
See also
- Common phrases in different languages (Japanese)
- Four-character idiom
- Henohenomoheji
- Japanese culture
- Japanese language and computers
- Japanese language guide
- Japanese literature
- Japanese name
- Japanese pitch accent
- Japanese pronouns
- Japanese proverbs
- List of Japanese learning resources
- The lists of Japanese words and words in other languages that have been derived from Japanese at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
External links
- Origin of the Japanese People and Language
- North Kyushu Creole – A hypothesis concerning the multilingual formation of Japanese
- Ethnologue report for Japanese
- Ethnologue report for language code JPN
Bibliography
- Bloch, Bernard. (1946). Studies in colloquial Japanese I: Inflection. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 66, 97-109.
- Bloch, Bernard. (1946). Studies in colloquial Japanese II: Syntax. Language, 22, 200-248.
- Chafe, William L. (1976). Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25-56). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1244-7350-4.
- Kuno, Susumu. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2621-1049-0.
- Kuno, Susumu. (1976). Subject, theme, and the speaker's empathy: A re-examination of relativization phenomena. In Charles N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 417-444). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1244-7350-4.
- Martin, Samuel E. (1975). A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-3000-1813-4.
- McClain, Yoko Matsuoka. (1981). Handbook of modern Japanese grammar: 口語日本文法便覧 Kōgo Nihon bumpō. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press. ISBN 4-5900-0570-0; ISBN 0-8934-6149-0.
- Miller, Roy. (1967). The Japanese language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Miller, Roy. (1980). Origins of the Japanese language: Lectures in Japan during the academic year, 1977-78. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-2959-5766-2.
- Mizutani, Osmau; & Mizutani, Nobuko. (1987). How to be polite in Japanese: 日本語の敬語 Nihongo no keigo. Tokyo: Japan Times. ISBN 4-7890-0338-8; ISBN 4-7890-0338-9.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). Japanese. In B. Comrie (Ed.), The major languages of east and south-east Asia. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-4150-4739-0.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-5213-6070-6 (hbk); ISBN 0-5213-6918-5 (pbk).
- Shibamoto, Janet S. (1985). Japanese women's language. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1264-0030-X. Graduate Level
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. (1996). An introduction to Japanese linguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-9855-5 (hbk); ISBN 0-6311-9856-3 (pbk). Upper Level Textbooks
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. (Ed.) (1999). The handbook of Japanese linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6312-0504-7. Readings/Anthologies