Japanese, The Spoken Language – Part 1 (Yale Language Series)

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Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin script (or romaji in Japanese) is used to a certain extent, such as for imported acronyms and to transcribe Japanese names and in other instances where non-Japanese speakers need to know how to pronounce a word (such as "ramen" at a restaurant). Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as 統一 tōitsu ("unification"). In addition to the Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the Japonic language family, but they are separate languages, [ citation needed] and are not mutually intelligible with Japanese, or with each other. All of the spoken Ryukyuan languages are classified by UNESCO as endangered.

Not until shortly after the turn of the second century did indications of language appear in Chinese texts. Chinese characters were adopted and records of spoken language were made in Japan. Hiragana and Katakana characters were incorporated as a relatively accurate way to represent the sounds of Chinese characters. Subete no ningen wa, umarenagara ni shite jiyū de ari, katsu, songen to kenri to ni tsuite byōdō de aru. Ningen wa, risei to ryōshin to o sazukerarete ori, tagai ni dōhō no seishin o motte kōdō shinakereba naranai. The so-called -te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ( Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ( Dekakete-mo ii? "May I go out?"), etc. Japanese students begin to learn kanji from their first year at elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of kyōiku kanji ("education kanji", a subset of jōyō kanji), specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 1,130 characters in junior high school, covering in total 2,136 jōyō kanji. The official list of jōyō kanji was revised several times, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters remained largely unchanged. Another uncommon feature of the text is that it emphasizes Japanese pitch accent in the words, according to standard Japanese.Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and 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. General considerations Hypotheses of genetic affiliation The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (politically part of Kagoshima), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time, [26] most likely the spoken form of Classical Japanese, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began decline during the late Meiji period. [27] The Ryūkyūan languages are classified by UNESCO as 'endangered', as young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand the languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryūkyūan languages, and is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands. [28]

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is not an L1. Arabic speakers first learn their respective local dialect. MSA is acquired through formal education. [10]Japanese words and words derived from Japanese in other languages at Wiktionary, Wikipedia's sibling project When NASA launched the 'Voyager 1 & 2' spacecraft in 1977, they put on board golden discs containing the sights and sounds of Earth, including greetings in 55 of the world’s most widely understood languages. These are currently travelling through space!

Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu (superseded by modern no) is preserved in words such as matsuge ("eyelash", lit. "hair of the eye"); modern mieru ("to be visible") and kikoeru ("to be audible") retain a mediopassive suffix - yu(ru) ( kikoyu → kikoyuru (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) → kikoeru (all verbs with the shimo-nidan conjugation pattern underwent this same shift in Early Modern Japanese)); and the genitive particle ga remains in intentionally archaic speech.I've never seen this series used anywhere although my experience with trying to use these books makes me conclude that it's best suited for classroom instruction. There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favor of a national language. [3] Ethnologue (2023) [ edit ]