Japanese language is the native tongue of the people of Japan and the neighboring Ryukyu and Bonin islands. Since 1868, the speech of the city of Tokyo has become the standard language of the Japanese people.
The rhythm of Japanese allows an even, metronomelike beat for each syllable. Differences in pitch are the distinctive features of words and phrases, much as differences in stress and emphasis are typical of English. Japanese dialects can be divided into three types, based on pitch-accent patterns. Standard Japanese illustrates the majority type. The Kansai, or Western, type is characteristic of western Honshu, most of Shikoku, and southern Kyushu. The single-pattern type is found in northeastern Honshu and central Kyushu.
The structure of Japanese is similar to that of Korean. Both Japanese and Korean have some similarities to languages in the Altaic and Uralic language families. The origins of both Japanese and Korean are still uncertain.
Japanese is spoken in different styles according to social situations. The intimate is correct in everyday conversation with family, friends, and coworkers. The polite is used with cultivated company and strangers. The honorific style confers honor and respect when spoken and is used for older people and superiors. There are also the impersonal style used in speeches and writing, and the modern literary style.
The Japanese language has both inflected and uninflected words. Each inflected word consists of a stem and one or more of a set of endings. Among inflected words are adjectives and verbs. The uninflected words include nouns and most conjunctions and postpositionals. A postpositional indicates a noun’s grammatical function within the sentence.
The Japanese language has 16 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds—ah, ee, oo, eh, and oh. A syllable may consist of only a vowel, only the nasal n, a consonant plus a vowel, or a consonant plus the semivowel y plus a vowel. Thus, the word ryokan would have three syllables—ryo, ka, n. The word taitei has four syllables—ta, i, te, i.
The Japanese predicate always ends the sentence, preceded by subject, object, indirect object, and other phrases in variable order. Each noun is followed by a postpositional.
The Japanese borrowed the Chinese system of writing, as well as many Chinese words. To express the complex Japanese grammatical endings, some Chinese characters were used as phonetic symbols without any meaning attached. These were later simplified into two systems of phonetic symbols called kana, which represent the sounds of the Japanese syllables.
Today, the two kana systems, called syllabaries, and about 2,000 Chinese characters are used in writing Japanese. The hiragana syllabary is used most often. It is a set of rounded characters derived from cursive Chinese characters. The more angular katakana syllabary is derived from parts of Chinese characters. Katakana is used to write words and other language elements in the equivalent elements of another alphabet. Katakana is also used to make a word stand out in a text, much like italics are used in English.
The Roman alphabet is also taught in Japanese schools, along with Romanized Japanese. Most books about Japan Romanize Japanese using the Hepburn system. This system writes consonants with their nearest English equivalent and vowels as in Italian. A slightly different Romanization, the National, is taught in Japan.
