The most widely-spoken language in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

is Japanese, which is separated into several dialects with Tokyo dialect considered Standard Japanese. In addition to the Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of

Kagoshima , is the capital Cities of Japan, city of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 583,966 in 285,992 households, and a population density of 1100 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . Etymology While the ...

in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the Japonic language family, but they are separate languages, and are not

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with Japanese, or with each other. All of the spoken Ryukyuan languages are classified by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

as endangered. In Hokkaidō, there is the Ainu language, which is spoken by the

Ainu people The Ainu are an Indigenous peoples, indigenous ethnic group who reside in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, including Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu, as well as the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, such as Sakhalin, the Ku ...

, who are the indigenous people of the island. The Ainu languages, of which Hokkaidō Ainu is the only extant variety, are isolated and do not fall under any language family. Ever since the Meiji period, Japanese has become widely used among the Ainu people and consequently Ainu languages have been classified critically endangered by

. In addition, languages such as Orok, Evenki and Nivkh spoken in formerly Japanese controlled southern Sakhalin are becoming more and more endangered. After the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

took control of the region, speakers of these languages and their descendants migrated to mainland Japan and still exist in small numbers.

History

Not until shortly after the turn of the second century did indications of language appear in Chinese texts.

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

were adopted and records of spoken language were made in Japan.

Hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

and

Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

characters were incorporated as a relatively accurate way to represent the sounds of Chinese characters.

Ryūkyūan languages

Chinese characters were first introduced to Ryūkyūan languages shortly into the 13th-century. Details concerning the language before then are not well known. 14th-century records indicate that gifts from Ryūkyū Islands to China used Hiragana, which indicates that these languages were tied to Mainland Japanese at the time.

Ainu languages

History records that people in Hokkaidō, Sakhalin and the

Kuril Islands The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands are a volcanic archipelago administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Far East. The islands stretch approximately northeast from Hokkaido in Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, separating the ...

spoke Ainu languages, but there are also places in and around Tōhoku whose names derive from Ainu languages. According to 16th-century records, Ainu languages had no written form. Only from the 19th-century did the Ainu languages begin to use Katakana.

Orok language

Records show that the Orok language was spoken during the latter part of the

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

in Hokkaidō, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; however, there are only a few speakers still in existence.

Nivkh language

Like Orok, the Nivkh language was spoken in Sakhalin and later in Hokkaidō, and the Kuril Islands. It is unknown whether speakers of Nivkh still remain in Japan.

European languages

Since the Middle Ages, owing to visits from Europeans, Japanese has adopted a number of foreign words. Post-1543 Portuguese was the initial contact language with Europeans, but this was later replaced by Dutch after the Japanese removed Portuguese people from the country. The Japanese government conducted negotiations with Western authorities in Dutch until around 1870.
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- Originally in '' Lingua'' 12 (1963): pp. 341–88. Since then English became the primary language of interaction with Western countries.

Language classifications

The oral languages spoken by the native peoples of the insular country of

at present and during

recorded history Recorded history or written history describes the historical events that have been recorded in a written form or other documented communication which are subsequently evaluated by historians using the historical method. For broader world h ...

belong to either of two primary phyla of human language: *

Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan () is a language family comprising Japanese language, Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and sig ...

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, 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 dia ...

(See also Japanese dialects) *** Hachijō Japanese *** Eastern Japanese *** Western Japanese *** Kyūshū Japanese ** Ryūkyūan languages *** Northern Ryūkyūan languages **** Amami ****

Kunigami is a List of villages in Japan, village in Kunigami District, Okinawa, Kunigami District, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. It occupies the north tip of Okinawa Island, with the East China Sea to the west, Pacific Ocean to the east, and Municipalities ...

**** Okinawa *** Southern Ryūkyūan languages **** Miyako **** Yaeyama **** Yonaguni * Ainu languages ** Hokkaidō Ainu language ** Sakhalin Ainu language (extinct) ** Kuril Ainu language (extinct) In addition to these two indigenous language families, there is Japanese Sign Language, as well as significant minorities of ethnic

Koreans Koreans are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Korean Peninsula. The majority of Koreans live in the two Korean sovereign states of North and South Korea, which are collectively referred to as Korea. As of 2021, an estimated 7.3 m ...

and Chinese, who make up respectively about 0.5% and 0.4% of the country's population and many of whom continue to speak their ethnic language in private (see

Zainichi Korean () are ethnic Koreans who immigrated to Japan before 1945 and are citizens or permanent residents of Japan, or who are descendants of those immigrants. They are a group distinct from South Korean nationals who have immigrated to Japan since t ...

). There is also a notable history of use of ''

Kanbun ''Kanbun'' ( 'Han Chinese, Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for offici ...

'' (

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

) as a language of literature and diplomacy in Japan, similar to the status of the

Latin language Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

in medieval Europe, which has left an indelible mark on the vocabulary of the Japanese language. ''Kanbun'' is a mandatory subject in the curricula of most Japanese

secondary school A secondary school, high school, or senior school, is an institution that provides secondary education. Some secondary schools provide both ''lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., b ...