Japanese

BRIEFING ABOUT JAPANESE
LANGUAGE
-Kaveti Nani Kartik (08)

-Atharv Itankar (58)
-Dhruv Kurliye (61)
-Mayuresh Gajalwar (59)
S.E COMP
INTRODUCTION
One of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers
in the early 21st century. 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.
THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE HAVE THREE DIFFERENT TYPES OF
SCRIPT
Japan didn't have their own writing system. So, when Japan and China
started exchanging emissaries to each others' courts, Japan started to adapt
the Chinese logographic system to work for Japanese, which worked, more
or less, and eventually became the charlie-foxtrot we know as "kanji"
today.
A few hundred years later, people started adapting some characters only for
their phonetic readings. The one the poets came up with eventually became
hiragana, and the one the Buddhists came up with eventually became
katakana.
Kanji is the base for writing, and make up the core meaning of most words,
while the kanas are the "glue", being used for ending sounds that can
change and particles (though, take this with a grain of salt, it's about as
consistent as English spelling). Hiragana is mostly used for this purpose,
while katakana is used mostly for loan words, sounds and old official
government documents.
WRITING
The Japanese writing system can be traced back to the 4th century AD, when Chinese
writing was introduced to Japan through the medium of Buddhism, as Japan adopted
Chinese cultural practices and reorganized its government in accordance with the Chinese
administrative structure.
Because the Chinese characters (called ”kanji” in Japanese) could not represent all the
elements of the Japanese language, two syllabaries of approximately 50 syllables each,
called ”hiragana” and ”katakana”, were created in the 12th century. Today, Japanese is
written with a mixture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. In addition, ”rōmaji ”(Roman
script) is also used.
Kanji are used to write nouns, including proper names, and stems of adjectives and verbs;
Hiragana is used to write inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs, various
grammatical particles, words for which there are no kanji, and some high frequency words;
Katakana is mostly used to write loanwords;
Rōmaji is used to write Arabic numerals, international units of measurement, and
acronyms. The Internet has accelerated its spread.
EXAMPLE OF WRITING
Here is the word for ‘I’ written in the three scripts:
DIALECTS
Although Japan is a relatively small country, it has a surprisingly large number of

dialects differing from each other in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Many
of them are mutually unintelligible. They are usually divided into two major
groups:
Eastern Japanese
Western Japanese
Two forms of the language are considered standard:
Hyojungo, or Standard Japanese
It is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications.
Standard Japanese can also be divided into bungo ‘literary language’ and kogo ‘oral
language.’ The two varieties differ in grammar and vocabulary. Bungo was the main
written form of Japanese until the late 1940s and is still important today for
historians, literary scholars and lawyers. Kogo is mostly used today.
Kyotsugo, or the common language.
Standard Japanese is based on, but is not identical to the Tokyo dialect. It is not
uniformly spoken across Japan. Instead, there are different versions of Standard
Japanese influenced by local varieties. Many people speak their local dialect in
addition to Standard Japanese.
VOCABULARY
The basic vocabulary of Japanese is a mixture of native Japanese words and words
borrowed from Chinese and other languages. Japanese vocabulary abounds in
borrowings from other languages. Japanese borrowed extensively from Chinese when
they adopted the Chinese orthography. Linguists have sometimes likened the impact of
Chinese writing on Japanese to the effect of the Norman conquest on the English
language. Japanese words often have synonyms, one of them from Chinese, the other
from Japanese. Words of Chinese origin (Sino-Japanese) are called kanga. They often
appear more formal to Japanese speakers, just as Latinate words often sound more
formal to English speakers. It is estimated that up to 60% of Japanese vocabulary
consists of Sino-Japanese words. Even Japanese numerals have two forms.
Japanese has also borrowed a number of words from Portuguese in the 16th century,
e.g., pan ‘bread,’ Iesu ‘Jesus.’ With the reopening of Japan in the 19th century,
Japanese borrowed from Dutch, German, French, and most recently from English.
Loanwords exist alongside native words, e.g., the word bypass can be rendered into
Japanese are mawarimiti (native Japanese), ukairo (Sino-Japanese), or baipasu (English
borrowing).
Onomatopoetic words
Onomatopoetic, or sound symbolic, words are very frequent in Japanese, e.g., wan-
wan ‘bow-wow,’ yobo-yobo ‘wobbly,’ doki-doki ‘fast heartbeat.’ Onomapoetic words
are often used in conjunction with regular words that have a general meaning,
e.g., waa-waa naku ‘weep,’ meso-meso naku ‘sob,’oi-oi naku ‘whimper.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/japanese/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-language
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/23098771/Why-are-there-different-writing-sy
stems-in-Japanese
THANK YOU

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BRIEFING ABOUT JAPANESE

-Kaveti Nani Kartik (08)

Although Japan is a relatively small country, it has a surprisingly large number of

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