Language Information
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Japanese nativename=
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Isolate
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''Nihongo'' (''Japanese'') in Japanese Script
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{Link without Title}
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Majority: (~15 million), United States (~12 million esp Hawaii ), Peru (~88,000), Australia (53,000~ esp Sydney ), Taiwan (16,000~20,000), Philippines (13,000), Guam (2000~) {Link without Title}
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130 million {Link without Title}
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Japonic
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Japanese Logographs And Syllabaries
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<br> <sup>
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None<br/> Japanese Government plays major role
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The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: modified
Chinese Characters called ''
Kanji '', and two
Syllabic scripts, ''
Hiragana '' and ''
Katakana ''. The
Latin Alphabet , ''
Rōmaji '', is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style
Arabic Numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional
Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from
Chinese , or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late
19th Century , Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from
Indo-European Languages , primarily
English . Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and Holland in the 17th century,
Dutch has also been influential, with words like (from ; "
Beer ") and (from ; "
Coffee ").
See Also: Japanese language classification
Some
Historical Linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of a
Japonic language family, the other member being
Ryūkyūan . Others, however, regard the kinds of speech found in the various
Ryūkyū Islands as dialects of Japanese, since it is not yet clear when and how the various islands came to be settled by members of this linguistic and cultural group.
The genetic affiliation of the Japonic family is uncertain. Numerous theories have been proposed, relating it to a wide variety of other languages and families, including
Extinct Language s spoken by historic cultures of the
Korean Peninsula ; the
Korean Language ; the
Altaic Languages ; and the
Austronesian Languages , among many others. It is also often suggested that it may be a
Creole Language combining more than one of these. At this point, no one theory is generally accepted as correct, and the issue is likely to remain controversial.
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken elsewhere. When
Japan occupied
Korea ,
Taiwan , parts of the
Chinese Mainland , and various Pacific islands during and before
World War II , locals in
Those Countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programs. As a result, there were many people in these countries until the 1970s, who could speak Japanese in addition to the local languages. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in
Brazil ) frequently employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 5% of Hawaiians speak Japanese and Japanese ancestry is the largest single ancestry in the state (over 24% of the population). Japanese emigrants can also be found in
Peru ,
Argentina ,
Australia (especially
Sydney ,
Brisbane , and
Melbourne ), the
United States (notably
California (1.2% of the population has Japanese ancestry) and
Hawaii ), and the
Philippines (particularly in
Davao and
Laguna ). Their descendants (known as , literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well; many schools, both primary and secondary, offer courses.
According to '', none in Angaur.
Japanese is the ''de facto'' official language of Japan, which is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There is a form of the language considered standard: standard Japanese, or the common language). The meanings of two terms are almost the same. and is a conception that forms a counterpart of dialect. This normative language was born after Meiji Restoration (1868) from the language spoken in uptown in
Tokyo for communicating necessity. is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.
Formerly, standard Japanese in writing (, "literary language") was different from colloquial language (, "colloquial language"). The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900, since then gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived
World War II are still written in , although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). is the predominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.
See Also: Japanese dialects
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. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional
Morphology ,
Vocabulary , and particle usage. Some even differ in
Vowel and
Consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.
The main distinction in Japanese dialects is between and , though Kyūshū-type dialects form a smaller, third group. Within each type are several subdivisions. The Western-type dialects are actually in the central region, with borders roughly formed by
Toyama ,
Kyōto ,
Hyōgo , and
Mie Prefectures; most
Shikoku dialects are also Western-type. Dialects further west are actually of the Tokyo type. The final category of dialects are those that are descended from the Eastern dialect of
Old Japanese ; these dialects are spoken in
Hachijojima ,
Tosa , and very few other locations.
Dialects from peripheral regions, such as
Tōhoku or
Tsushima , may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The several dialects used in
Kagoshima in southern
Kyūshū are famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyūshū as well, probably due in part to the Kagoshima dialects' peculiarities of pronunciation, which include the existence of closed syllables (i.e., syllables that end in a consonant, such as or for Standard Japanese "spider"). The vocabulary of Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect.
Kansai-ben , a group of dialects from west-central Japan, is spoken by many Japanese; the Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy.
The
Ryūkyūan Languages , while closely related to Japanese, are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the
Japonic family, and are not dialects of Japanese. They are spoken in the
Ryukyu Islands and in some islands that are politically part of
Kagoshima Prefecture . Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages.
Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including portions of the Ryūkyū islands like Okinawa) due not only to
Television 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.
See Also: Japanese phonology
Japanese vowels are "pure" sounds, similar to their
Spanish ,
Greek or
Italian counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel '''', which is like , but
Compressed instead of rounded. Japanese has five vowels, and
Vowel Length is phonemic, so each one has both a short and a long version.
Some Japanese consonants have several
Allophone s, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese language up to and including the first half of the twentieth century, the phonemic sequence was
Palatalized and realized phonetically as , approximately ''chi'' ''''; however, now and are distinct, as evidenced by words like "party" and "blood."
The 'r' of the Japanese language (technically a
Lateral Apical postalveolar 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 syllabic structure and the s allowed within a syllable consist of one of a subset of the consonants plus . These type of clusters only occur in onsets. However, consonant clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are a nasal followed by a homo-organic consonant.
Consonant Length (gemination) is also phonemic.
See Also: Japanese grammar
The basic Japanese word order is
Subject Object Verb . Subject, Object, and other grammatical relations are usually marked by
Particles , which are suffixed to the words that they modify, and are thus properly called
Postposition s.
The basic sentence structure is
Topic-comment . For example, (). ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle ''-wa''. The verb is , a
Copula , commonly translated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"). As a phrase, is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Miss Tanaka." Thus Japanese, like
Chinese ,
Korean , and many other Asian languages, is often called a
Topic-prominent Language , which means it has a strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. The sentence () literally means, "As for elephants, (their) noses are long". The topic is "elephant", and the subject is "nose".
Japanese is a
Pro-drop Language , meaning that the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. In addition, it is commonly felt, particularly in spoken Japanese, that the shorter a sentence is, the better. As a result of this grammatical permissiveness and tendency towards brevity, Japanese speakers tend naturally to omit words from sentences, rather than refer to them with
Pronoun s. In the context of the above example, would mean "
noses are long," while by itself would mean "[they are long." A single verb can be a complete sentence: "
/ we / they / etc did
In addition, since adjectives can form the predicate in a Japanese sentence (below), a single adjective can be a complete sentence: "[I'm jealous
it !".
While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some
Indo-European Language s, and function differently. Instead, Japanese typically relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group; and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. Here, the in-group includes the speaker and the out-group doesn't, and their boundary depends on context. For example, (literally, "explained" with a benefit from the out-group to the in-group) means "
explained it to [me/us ". Similarly, (literally, "explained" with a benefit from the in-group to the out-group) means "
explained [it to [him/her/them]". Such beneficiary auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action.
Japanese "pronouns" also function differently from most modern Indo-European pronouns (and more like nouns) in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. For instance, one cannot say in English:
- The amazed he ran down the street. (ungrammatical)
But one ''can'' grammatically say essentially the same thing in Japanese:
: (grammatically correct)
This is partly due to the fact that these words evolved from regular nouns, such as "you" ( "lord"), "you" ( "that side, yonder"), and "I" ( "servant"). This is why some linguists do not classify Japanese "pronouns" as pronouns, but rather as referential nouns. Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situations requiring special emphasis as to who is doing what to whom.
The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as ( "private") or (also ), while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word ( "oneself", "myself") or . Similarly, different words such as , , and (, more formally "the one before me") may be used to refer to a listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. When used in different social relationships, the same word may have positive (intimate or respectful) or negative (distant or disrespectful) connotations.
Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English. For example, when speaking to one's teacher, it is appropriate to use (, teacher), but inappropriate to use . This is because is used to refer to people of equal or lower status, and one's teacher has higher status.
It is very common for English speakers to include or at the beginning of every Japanese sentence. Though these sentences are grammatically correct, they sound terribly strange even in very formal situations. It is roughly the equivalent of using a noun over and over in English, when a pronoun would suffice: "John is coming over, so make sure you make John a sandwich, because John loves sandwiches. I hope John likes the dress I'm wearing.. ."
Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect. The noun () may refer to a single book or several books; () can mean "person" or "people"; and () 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. Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus usually means ''Mr./Mrs./Miss. Tanaka''. Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate a group of individuals through the addition of a collective suffix (a noun suffix that indicates a group), such as , but this is not a true plural: the meaning is closer to the English phrase "and company". A group described as may include people not named Tanaka. Some Japanese nouns are effectively plural, such as "people" and "we/us", while the word for "friend" is considered singular, although plural in form.
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 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 form indicates a perfect tense. For example, means "He has come (and is still here)", but means "He is eating".
Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle is added. For example, () "It is OK" becomes () "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle () is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: "(What about) this?"; () "(What's your) name?".
Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb. For example, () "I will eat bread" or "I eat bread" becomes () "I will not eat bread" or "I do not eat bread".
The so-called verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ( "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ( "May I go out?"), etc.
The word (plain), (polite) is the
Copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English ''be'', but often takes on other roles, including a marker for tense, when the verb is conjugated into its past form (plain), (polite). This comes into use because only adjectives and verbs can carry tense in Japanese. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence ("there is") or, in some contexts, property: (negative ) and (negative ), for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, "There's a cat", "
{Link without Title} haven't got a good idea".
The verb "to do" (, polite form ) is often used to make verbs from nouns ( "to cook", "to study", etc.) and has been productive in creating modern slang words. Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs to express concepts that are described in English using a verb and a preposition (e.g. "to fly out, to flee," from "to fly, to jump" + "to put out, to emit").
There are three types of
Adjective (see also
Japanese Adjectives ):
# , or adjectives, which have a
Conjugating ending () (such as "to be hot") which can become past ( "it was hot"), or negative ( "it is not hot"). Note that is also an adjective, which can become past ( "it was not hot").
#: "a hot day".
# , or adjectives, which are followed by a form of the
Copula , usually . For example (strange)
#: "a strange person".
# , also called true adjectives, such as "that"
#: "that mountain".
Both and may
Predicate sentences. For example,
: "The rice is hot."
: "He's strange."
Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs.
The in Modern Japanese are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to directly modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include "big", "this", "so-called" and "amazing".
Both and form
Adverb s, by following with in the case of :
: "become strange",
and by changing to in the case of :
: "become hot".
The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by
Postposition s, also called
Particles . These include for example:
: "(I) like go skiing."
- for the topic. It can co-exist with case markers above except , and it overrides and .
: "As for me, Thai food is good." The nominative marker after is hidden under . (Note that English generally makes no distinction between sentence topic and subject.)
Note: The difference between and goes beyond the English distinction between sentence topic and subject. While indicates the topic, which the rest of the sentence describes or acts upon, it carries the implication that the subject indicated by is not unique, or may be part of a larger group.
: "As for Mr. Ikeda, he is forty-two years old." Others in the group may also be of that age.
Absence of often means the subject is the
Focus of the sentence.
: "It is Mr. Ikeda who is forty-two years old." This is a reply to an implicit or explicit question who in this group is forty-two years old.
See Also: Japanese honorifics
Japanese titles
Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.
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 ''.
Whereas () (polite language) is commonly an
Inflection al system, () (respectful language) and () (humble language) often employ many special honorific and humble alternate verbs: "go" becomes in polite form, but is replaced by in honorific speech and or in humble speech.
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/her group. For example, the suffix ("Mr" "Mrs." or "Miss") is an example of honorific language. 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". When speaking directly to one's superior in one's company or when speaking with other employees within one's company about a superior, a Japanese person will use vocabulary and inflections of the honorific register to refer to the in-group superior and his or her speech and actions. When speaking to a person from another company (i.e., a member of an out-group), however, a Japanese person will use the plain or the humble register to refer to the speech and actions of his or her own in-group superiors. In short, the register used in Japanese to refer to the person, speech, or actions of any particular individual varies depending on the relationship (either in-group or out-group) between the speaker and listener, as well as depending on the relative status of the speaker, listener, and third-person referents. For this reason, the Japanese system for explicit indication of social register is known as a system of "relative honorifics." This stands in stark contrast to the
Korean system of "absolute honorifics," in which the same register is used to refer to a particular individual (e.g. one's father, one's company president, etc.) in any context regardless of the relationship between the speaker and interlocutor. Thus, polite Korean speech can sound very presumptuous when translated verbatim into Japanese, as in Korean it is acceptable and normal to say things like "Our Company-President…" when communicating with a member of an out-group, which would be very inappropriate in a Japanese social context.
Most
Noun s in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of or as a prefix. is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas 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 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word 'friend,' would become 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 polite speaker may sometimes refer to 'water' as in order to show politeness.
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.
The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called ( or infrequently , i.e. "
Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as ( or rarely , i.e. the words"). In addition to words from this original language, present-day Japanese includes a great number of words that were either borrowed from
Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots following Chinese patterns. These words, known as (), entered the language from the fifth century onwards via contact with Chinese culture, both directly and through the Korean peninsula. According to some estimates,
Chinese-based Words may comprise as much as 60%–70% of the total dictionary vocabulary of the modern Japanese language and form as much as 18%–40% of words used in speech.
Like Latin-derived words in English, words typically are perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.
A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from
Korean and
Ainu . Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, particularly ones of European extraction, which are called . This began with
Borrowings From Portuguese in the
16th Century , followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's
Long Isolation of the
Edo Period . With the
Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the
19th Century , borrowing occurred from
German ,
French and
English . Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.
In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into
Chinese ,
Korean , and
Vietnamese via their
Kanji characters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, ("politics"), and ("chemistry") are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greek- and Latin-derived words are shared among modern European languages, although many academic words formed from such roots were certainly coined by native speakers of other languages, such as English.
In the past few decades, (made-in-Japan English) has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as (< ''one'' + ''pattern'', "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and (< ''skin'' + ''-ship'', "physical contact"), although coined by compounding English roots, are nonsensical in a non-Japanese context.
Additionally, many native Japanese words have become commonplace in English, due to the popularity of many Japanese cultural exports. Words such as
Sushi ,
Judo ,
Karate ,
Sumo ,
Karaoke ,
Origami ,
Tsunami ,
Samurai ,
Haiku ,
Ninja ,
Sayonara ,
Rickshaw (from ),
Futon ,
Tycoon and many others have become part of the English language. See
List Of English Words Of Japanese Origin for more.
See Also: Japanese writing system
Before the
5th Century , the Japanese had no
Writing system of their own. They began to adopt the
Chinese Writing script along with many other aspects of
Chinese Culture after their introduction by
Korea n monks and scholars during the 5th and 6th centuries AD.
At first, the Japanese wrote in
Classical Chinese , with Japanese names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds. Later, this latter principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose; however, some Japanese words were written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. An example of this mixed style is the
Kojiki , which was written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as , a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech syllable by syllable.
Over time, a writing system evolved. and
Katakana .
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: and
Katakana . The
Latin Alphabet is also sometimes used. Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji characters when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as ("unification").
Hiragana are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji, and also following kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs (and adjectives) in Japanese are
Conjugated , kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing its meaning. For this reason, hiragana are suffixed to the ends of kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. Hiragana used in this way are called
Okurigana . Hiragana are also written in a superscript called
Furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading. This is done to facilitate learning, as well as to clarify particularly old or obscure (or sometimes invented) readings.
Katakana, like hiragana, are a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. For example "Australia" has been adapted as (), and "supermarket" has been adapted and shortened into ().
''Rōmaji'' (), literally "Roman letters," is the Japanese term for the
Latin Alphabet . ''Rōmaji'' are used for some loan words like "CD", "DVD", etc., and also for some Japanese creations like "Sony."
Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War. During the period of post-war occupation (and influenced by the views of some U.S. officials), various schemes including the complete abolition of kanji and exclusive use of rōmaji were considered. The ("common use kanji", originally called
for general use ) scheme arose as a compromise solution.
Japanese students begin to learn kanji characters from their first year at elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of ("education kanji", a subset of ), 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 junior high school, covering in total 1,945 characters, which is generally considered sufficient for everyday life, although many kanji used in everyday life are not included in the list. Various semi-official bodies were set up to monitor and enforce restrictions on the use of kanji in the press, publishing, in television broadcasts, etc. The official list of was revised several times, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters remained largely unchanged.
As for kanji for personal names, the circumstances are somewhat complicated. and (an appendix of additional characters for names) are approved for registering personal names. Names containing unapproved characters are denied registration. However, as with the list of , criteria for inclusion were often arbitrary and led to many common and popular characters being disapproved for use. Under popular pressure and following a court decision holding the exclusion of common characters unlawful, the list of was substantially extended from 92 in 1951(the year it was first decreed) to 983 in 2004. Furthermore, families whose names are not on these lists were permitted to continue using the older forms.
Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language. International interest in the Japanese language dates from the 1800s but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese pop culture (such as anime and video games) since the 1990s. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003: 900,000 South
Koreans , 389,000
Chinese , 381,000
Australians , and 140,000
Americans study Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students study at
Japanese Universities and Japanese
Language School s, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. In addition, local governments and some
NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including
Japanese Brazilians and foreigners married to Japanese nationals.
The Japanese government provides standardized 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'' which tests the learner's ability to understand Japanese in a business setting. See also
British Association For Japanese Studies .
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- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). Japanese. In B. Comrie (Ed.), ''The major languages of east and south-east Asia''. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-04739-0.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). ''The languages of Japan''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36070-6 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-36918-5 (pbk).
- Shibamoto, Janet S. (1985). ''Japanese women's language''. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-640030-X. Graduate Level
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. (1996). ''An introduction to Japanese linguistics''. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-19855-5 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-19856-3 (pbk). Upper Level Textbooks
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