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 man...