JAPANESE

HISTORY
ABIGAIL DANIELA RAMÍREZ HERNÁNDEZ

Unlike most western languages,

Japanese Today
More than 130 million people
speak Japanese, making it the
ninth most widely spoken language
in the world. Outside of Japan,
there are another 5 million people
who speak Japanese with some
degree of proficiency –
predominantly Japanese
descendants in Hawaii and Brazil.
Japanese has an extensive
grammatical system to express
politeness and formality. Broadly
speaking, there are three main
politeness levels in spoken
Japanese: the plain form
(“kudaketa”), the simple polite
form (“teinei”) and the advanced
polite form (“keigo”). The person in
the lower position is expected to
use a polite form of speech,
whereas the other might use a
more plain form. Strangers will also
speak to each other politely.

Japanese roots
Japanese is the only major language whose genetic affiliation is not known.
The hypothesis relating Japanese to Korean remains the strongest, but other
hypotheses also have been advanced. Some attempt to relate Japanese to the
language groups of South Asia such as the Austronesian, the Austroasiatic,
and the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Writing system

漢字 - kanji
カタカナ- katakana
ひらがな- hiragana
The adaptation of Chinese characters during the sixth to ninth centuries
A.D. was the most important event in the development of the language. By
the 12th century, the syllabic writing systems, “hiragana” and “katakana”,
were created out of “kanji”, providing the Japanese new freedom in
writing their native language. Today, Japanese is written with a mixture of
the three: “kanji”, “hiragana”, and “katakana”.

Foreign influence

外来 Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted

a huge amount of “gairaigo”: foreign words mainly
from English. These include “teburu” (table), “biru”

語
(beer), “gurasu” (glass), “aisu” (ice), “takushi” (taxi) and
“hoteru” (hotel).

There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch

and Spanish, such as “pan” (bread) and “igirisu” (the
UK), from the Portuguese “po” and “ingles”. Such

garaigo words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th and

17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants
started to visit the country.