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* Susumu Ohno and other linguists including R. Caidwell, Susumu Shiba and Fujiwara Akira have suggested a possible relationship between Japanese and [[Tamil language|Tamil]], a member of the [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian language]] family spoken in [[South India]]. Evidence for this theory is that Japanese and Tamil ... |
Specialists in Japanese [[historical linguistics]] all agree that Japanese is related to the [[Ryukyuan languages]] (including [[Okinawan language|Okinawan]]); together, Japanese and Ryukyuan are grouped in the [[Japonic languages]]. Among these specialists, the possibility of a genetic relation to [[Goguryeo]] has the... |
It should be noted that linguistic studies, like all fields, can be strongly affected by national politics and other non-academic factors. For example, most linguists would say that [[Romanian language|Romanian]] and [[Moldovan language|Moldovan]] are essentially the same language, and that they are known as two differ... |
==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 [[Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere|those countries]] were forced to learn Japanese in... |
=== Official status === |
Japanese is the 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: {{nihongo|''hyōjungo''|標準語|}} or standard Japanese, and {{nihongo|''kyōtsūgo''|共通語|}} or the common language. As government policy has mode... |
Standard Japanese can also be divided into {{nihongo|''bungo''|文語|}} or "literary language," and {{nihongo|''kōgo''|口語|}} or "oral language," which have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. ''Bungo'' was the main method of writing Japanese until the late 1940s, and still has r... |
===Dialects=== |
{{main|Japanese dialects}} |
Dozens of dialects are 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 (linguistics)|morphology]], [[vocabulary]], particle usage, and pronunciation. So... |
Dialects from less central regions, such as the [[Tōhoku Region|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 nea... |
The [[Ryukyuan languages]] are spoken in the [[Ryukyu Islands]]. 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 langua... |
Recently, Standard Japanese has |
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