Interesting facts about the language

The origin and classification of the Japanese language are highly controversial among linguists. No precise relationship to other languages can be established, mainly due to the very late written evidence from the 8th century AD. There are striking similarities to Korean and the Altaic languages (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic).

A special feature of Japanese is that there are almost exclusively native speakers and virtually no second language speakers in the world. Therefore, Japanese is not considered a global language, although with 127.7 million speakers it is the ninth most spoken language in the world. The largest groups of Japanese living abroad are found in the USA and South America (primarily Brazil), and there is also a relatively large group in Germany.

The language structure and grammatical structures of Japanese are largely identical to Korean, but apart from a few Chinese foreign words, there are no similarities in the vocabulary. This demonstrates how difficult it is to classify the Japanese language. The only proven relationship to Japanese is the Ryukyu languages, spoken on the Ryukyu Islands. However, some scholars also classify these as Japanese dialects.

The modern Japanese writing system is one of the most complex in the world. It consists of kanji, which originate from the Chinese writing system. These characters often form the root of words. Kana, which consists of the syllabary scripts hiragana and katakana, is also used. Hiragana is mostly used to represent grammatical functions. Katakana, on the other hand, is primarily used for foreign words. The Latin alphabet, called romaji in Japan, is used only for transcribing the language.