JAPANESE LANGUAGE

one of the world's major languages, ranking ninth in terms of the number of speakers with 125 million. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in North and South America, who have varying degrees of proficiency in Japanese. Since the mid-20th century, no nation other than Japan has used Japanese as a first or a second language. language spoken by about 124,000,000 people in the islands of Japan, including the Ryukyus. Some 1,000,000 people of Japanese descent who live in other parts of the world also speak Japanese with some degree of proficiency. Japanese is composed of a large number of dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. Mainland dialects are divisible into three or four groupings of related dialects, but the greatest differences in dialects are to be found between mainland dialects and those of the Ryukyu Islands. Especially since World War II, strong forces have been homogenizing the language. The rapid spread of literacy and elementary education that occurred after the Meiji Restoration (1868) established a common written language that was derived from the dialect of residential Tokyo. Aside from their own dialect, many people throughout Japan now speak this common tongue, though with their own accents. The large postwar rural-to-urban migration and the impact of the electronic media have accelerated this process of assimilation. As a consequence, local dialects have been fading faster than previously. Japanese is a polysyllabic language. It uses 5 vowels a, i, u, e, o, and 15 consonants p, t, k, b, d, g, ts (ch), s (sh), z (j), m, n, r, h, y and w. Most Japanese dialects use pitch accents. Stress accents are never used. Nouns are inflected, and verbs and adjectives conjugate with endings. The personal-pronoun system is complex and reflects an intricate system of social hierarchy. The filiation of Japanese with other languages is not clear, though it is probably related to Korean and possibly to the Altaic languages. There are two hypothesis on the origin of Japanese. It could be that a Proto-Japanese-speaking people on the Asian continent gave Japan the ancestor tongue by way of the Yayoi culture in northern Kyushu 2,000 years ago. This protolanguage was then eclipsed on the continent by other languages. The stronger hypothesis has Proto-Japanese dialects developing from Korean 5,000 years ago and slowly squeezing out competing contemporaneous dialects. Some evidence for this exists from 8th-century recordings of non-Proto-Japanese features of certain Eastern dialects that have since largely disappeared. The history of the language is usually divided into four periods: Old Japanese (to the 8th century); Late Old Japanese (9th11th century); Middle Japanese (12th16th century); and Modern Japanese (from the 17th century). In this evolution the syntax has not varied much, but there has been considerable change in phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. Principal among the sound changes is the shift of initial p- to h-, the loss of three vowels , , and , and the disappearance of vestigial vowel harmony. There has also been the replacement of older finite forms of verbs and adjectives with noun-modifying forms. Though the vocabulary is largely indigenous, Chinese from the 6th to the 9th century played an important role in the development of the language. A large percentage of Japanese words derive from Chinese loan elements, much as English has borrowed extensively from Greek, Latin, and French. The adoption of Chinese characters for writing had far-reaching consequences on written and spoken Japanese. This adoption is traceable to the 3rd century, but the earliest extant records longer than a few words are from the 8th century. Originally the characters were used to write Chinese, but then they came to symbolize native Japanese words similar in meaning to that of the Chinese. In this process most of the characters were simplified and made more cursive to the point that in many cases little or nothing is left of their original shape. Every Chinese character, or kanji, has acquired a twofold reading. It can represent a Japanese word that imitates the sound and meaning of the original Chinese, known as the on reading, or it can represent a native word of similar meaning, known as the kun reading. It is this latter reading that is the accustomed meaning of the character when it is used by itself. Furthermore, every character has a third use in which its on or kun sound can be used phonetically to represent a Japanese syllable while abstracting from its on or kun meaning. A kanji used as a phonogram is called a kana. Syllabic writing is traceable to the 6th century, when kanji were used as phonograms, but it was not until the 9th century that standardized systems of kana began to develop. Eventually two different systems of phonetic representation emerged, both based on kanji. One system, called hiragana, or common kana, was formulated by simplifying and stylizing the cursive kanji that had been used as phonograms in the 8th-century imperial anthology of poetry, the Man'yoshu. The use of hiragana was given impetus through the writing of poetry, diaries, and novels by court women of the Heian period (7941185). At that time hiragana was known as onnade, or letters of women, as men generally continued to write in kanji. The other system is called katakana, or partial kana. It developed from diverse systems of priestly shorthand that aided the reading of Chinese texts and Buddhist scriptures by supplying, in the form of abbreviated kanji strokes, Japanese particles and endings missing in the Chinese. Katakana was at first highly individualized and specific to every sect and sometimes even to every individual, but in the 10th century common elements began to appear as popularity normalized its use. Until the 15th century Japanese was written with a mixture of kanji and katakana. At that time the hiragana symbols became the popular and literary medium, with katakana being used for scholarly and practical texts. In modern Japanese katakana is used only in machine-printed telegrams and memoranda of offices and companies or for foreign loanwords, onomatopoetic words, and the names of flora and fauna. Present writing is in kanji and hiragana, the orthography of which has been reformed since World War II. In these reforms the unrestricted use of thousands of kanji characters was limited to a list of 1,850 symbols for official and daily use, and their shapes and strokes were greatly simplified. In the early 1980s the number of characters on the list was increased to 1,945, and additional character simplifications were adopted. Kana spellings are now based on contemporary pronunciation, in contrast to the prior retention of spellings based on the sound of Late Old Japanese. Additional reading Two widely used college textbooks are Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani, An Introduction to Modern Japanese (1977); and Eleanor Harz Jorden and Mari Noda, Japanese, the Spoken Language, 3 vol. (198790). Roy Andrew Miller, The Japanese Language (1967, reprinted 1980), provides a general introduction with emphasis on historical development, and his Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages (1971), documents the hypothesis relating Japanese to the Altaic family. G.B. Sansom, An Historical Grammar of Japanese (1928, reissued 1995), is an excellent introduction to Old Japanese, detailing the development of the writing systems. A historical survey of the literary language can be found in Yaeko Sato Habein, The History of the Japanese Written Language (1984). Samuel E. Martin, A Reference Grammar of Japanese (1975, reprinted with corrections, 1988), is a comprehensive description of Modern Japanese, with numerous examples taken from published materials, while his The Japanese Language Through Time (1987), traces the historical developments of major grammatical structures. Susumu Kuno, The Structure of the Japanese Language (1973), is a particularly useful introduction, emphasizing particles and topic construction. James D. McCawley, The Phonological Component of a Grammar of Japanese (1968), technically treats Japanese phonology and includes a useful survey of Japanese-dialect accentual systems. A recent comprehensive survey encompassing all the major fields of Japanese linguistics is Masayoshi Shibatani, The Languages of Japan (1990). Masayoshi Shibatani