Japanese language

• 1. Introduction

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  The Japanese language has around 123 million speakers, and Japan is the only country where it is the national language. Yet it sits almost alone in the world's family tree of tongues. Scholars have tried to tie it to Ainu, to Korean, to Austronesian, even to Greek and to Sumerian. According to Martine Robbeets, Japanese has faced more attempts to link it to other languages than any other language on earth. None of those proposals has won wide acceptance. Only its bond to the Ryukyuan languages has firm support. So where did this language come from, and how did a script borrowed from China become three writing systems at once? How does a single spoken word like the one for chopsticks and the one for bridge sound the same yet mean different things? And why does the choice of the word for I depend on whether you are a man or a woman, formal or intimate? The answers run from settlers crossing from the Korean peninsula to teenage girls in the 1990s inventing slang.

• 2. Settlers And Silence

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  Proto-Japonic, the shared ancestor of Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have arrived with settlers from the Korean peninsula in the early to mid 4th century BC, during the Yayoi period. These newcomers displaced the languages of the original Jomon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language. Because writing had not yet reached Japan from China, no direct record of this era survives. Everything known about the prehistory must come from internal reconstruction of Old Japanese, or from comparison with the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese dialects. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded only a handful of Japanese words. Substantial Old Japanese texts would not appear until the 8th century, a gap of centuries that leaves the language's first appearance in Japan a matter of inference rather than evidence.

• 3. Eighty Eight Sounds

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  The Kojiki, written in AD 712, is the earliest text, and it was set down entirely in Chinese characters. Those characters served different roles, standing in turn for Chinese, for the kanbun reading method, and for Old Japanese itself. The Old Japanese passages use Man'yogana, a system that pressed kanji into service for their sound as well as their meaning, transcribing speech mora by mora. From this system, Old Japanese can be reconstructed with 88 distinct morae. The Kojiki preserves all 88, but every later text drops to 87, because the distinction between two of them was lost almost immediately after the Kojiki was composed. That inventory later shrank to 67 in Early Middle Japanese. Traces of this old grammar still echo today. The ancient genitive particle tsu survives inside matsuge, the word for eyelash, which literally means hair of the eye.

• 4. Waves From China

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  The Heian period, from 794 to 1185, gave rise to Early Middle Japanese, which became the basis for the literary standard of Classical Japanese. That standard stayed in common use until the early 20th century. During these centuries the language reshaped its very sounds, much of it driven by an influx of Chinese loanwords. Speakers gained a length distinction for both consonants and vowels, palatal consonants such as kya, labial clusters such as kwa, and closed syllables. These shifts turned Japanese into a mora-timed language, the rhythm it still keeps. The Chinese writing system itself had reached Japan from Baekje before the 5th century AD, arriving alongside Buddhism. The Japanese king Bu used that script to present a petition to Emperor Shun of Song in AD 478, a sign of how quickly the borrowed letters became a tool of statecraft.

• 5. Missionaries And Bread

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  Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries became the first non-native sources to describe the language, producing works such as the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam. Their records fall within Late Middle Japanese, the years from 1185 to 1600, split roughly between the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Thanks to these outsiders, this stretch of the language is better documented than anything before it. Familiar modern forms begin to surface here. The k in the final mora of adjectives drops away, giving shiroi where earlier speakers said shiroki. A trace of an older shift survives in the greeting o-hayo gozaimasu, meaning good morning. This period also brought the first loanwords from European languages. The word pan, for bread, and tabako, for tobacco, both entered Japanese from Portuguese and remain common today.

• 6. From Kyoto To English

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  The Edo period, spanning 1603 to 1867, marks the start of Modern Japanese. Though the capital moved to Edo, now Tokyo, the standard language continued from the speech of the Kyoto elites, with only minor influence from the Edo dialect. The decisive change came in 1853, when Japan ended its self-imposed isolation. From that point the flow of loanwords from European languages rose sharply. The period since 1945 has absorbed words from German, including arubaito for a temporary job and wakuchin for vaccine, and from Portuguese, such as kasutera for sponge cake. English has supplied a flood of technology terms like pasokon for personal computer, intanetto for internet, and kamera for camera. So heavy is this English borrowing that Japanese has developed new sound distinctions, separating the sounds in paati for party and dizunii for Disney, which appear only in loanwords.

• 7. Three Scripts In One

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  Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems at once. Kanji, the characters of Chinese origin, carry both Chinese loanwords and native Japanese morphemes. Two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, were both developed from Man'yogana. Hiragana emerged around the 9th century and was mainly used by women, seen as informal, while katakana and kanji were treated as formal and used by men and in official settings. Because hiragana was so accessible, its use spread until, by the 10th century, everyone used it. Schooling sets the boundaries of this written world. The list of kyoiku kanji specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child learns by the end of sixth grade. Junior high adds another 1,130, reaching a total of 2,136 joyo kanji. For names, the jinmeiyo kanji list grew from 92 characters in 1951 to 983 in 2004, after a court ruled that excluding common characters was unlawful.

• 8. Topic And Politeness

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  Japanese word order places the verb at the end of the sentence, with particles marking the grammatical role of each word. The deeper structure is topic and comment. Once a topic is stated with the particle wa, it is normally dropped from later sentences until a new wa changes it. The subject, marked by ga, sits inside that comment, which is why a phrase like watashi wa zou ga suki da, literally as for myself elephants are likeable, gets flattened in English to I like elephants. Many words usually called pronouns behave more like nouns and evolved from them, as boku, a word for I, came from a word meaning servant. The choice among them shifts with the speaker's sex and the social situation. This hierarchy runs through an extensive system of honorifics, where the verb iku, to go, becomes irassharu in honorific speech and ukagau or mairu in humble speech. The same care surfaced in the 1990s, when teenage girls known as kogal challenged the traditional feminine speech patterns and coined a deviant slang that reshaped Japanese norms of gender, proof that a language this old still bends to the people who speak it.