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Japanese

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Japanese

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Also known as Japanese language, Japanesic

language spoken in East Asia

OverviewAI-generated

Japanese is a natural and modern language indigenous to Japan. It is an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order and a nominative–accusative alignment. The language follows a time–manner–place structure and includes a desiderative grammatical mood. Its native label is 日本語.

The language is regulated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Agency for Cultural Affairs. It is written using kanji, kana, katakana, and hiragana. There are approximately 128,000,000 speakers, writers, or signers. Japanese is a subclass of Japonic and is distinct from Javanese.

It appears in various Wikimedia projects under the code ja. Specific resources include the Stack Exchange sites japanese.stackexchange.com and ja.stackoverflow.com. The language is described in sources such as the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary and the Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition. Films in this language are categorized under Category:Japanese-language films.

Synthesized by Vinony from 24 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Vinony graph, Geo. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo; [ɲihoŋɡo] ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.

The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic, and the now discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Japanese” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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