by Victoria Wilson

Created on: December 01, 2007

Japanese is the official language of the country of Japan, located in East Asia. A native language to 122 million speakers and second language to a further 8 million in such distant lands as Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and the UK, Japanese is the 9th most widely spoken language in the world and the 4th most prevalent language on the Internet.

Unlike the languages of neighbouring China and Taiwan, Japanese is not tonal and has more similarities to Korean, Mongolian and, according to some linguists, the Turkic family of languages. Intonation can have significance, and there are many dialects the most extreme of which being that of Okinawa (sometimes considered to be a language in its own right). Length of syllables is also significant a double length syllable can signify a different word with a very different meaning. This is why the tempo of Japanese speech is so rhythmic and measured.

While the Japanese didn't adopt China's tones, they did make use of their written characters. Many appear identical to simplified Chinese script, while some are based on the traditional script or have subtle modifications. In Japanese these are known as kanji, each character having two readings a kun' native Japanese reading and an on' Chinese reading (although the on' reading is not necessarily consistent with the sound of the character actually being read in Chinese)! Fortunately the meaning of the character is often the same between the two languages, even if the sound of the words or syllables it denotes differs. There are 1946 officially recognised kanji, complemented by two syllabaries (alphabets where each symbol corresponds to a whole syllable, rather than a single vowel or consonant). These each have 46 characters, and are the first scripts learned by Japanese schoolchildren; hiragana and katakana (the latter being used often for emphasis or imported words).

The Japanese have a distinctive culture that has become a popular curiosity all over the world. During its history Japan has oscillated between periods of enthusiasm for external ideas and technology, and periods of almost complete isolation. This has no doubt contributed to the unique social conventions that have evolved during the nation's transition from early settlement of nomadic peoples, through perfection of wet-paddy agriculture, via many years of complex feudal rule and subsequent emergence as an extremely successful industrial economy. The unique Japanese perspective on life is reflected in the emphasis on honorifics, extreme politeness and socially conscious ambiguity in Japanese language.

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