1. The origin of the Japanese is an uncertain issue to this day, there are several theories.

One of
them is proposed by Hanihara scientists. According to his theory, the most popular in Japan,
modern Japanese are descendants of a proto-Mongoloid community that mixed with a group from
Kiayu, Manchuria and others. According to the second theory, most scientists believe that the
Japanese arose on the basis of the Yamato ethno-social group in the 6th and 7th centuries, the basis
of which was the Yamato state in the Kinki region.

But the definition of the origin of the people is that scientists cannot determine how to call the
Japanese, a race, an ethnic group, or a nation

2. Currently there are several theories:

The isolated theory: The isolated theory suggests that the Japanese language is not related to any
other known language. It is currently one of the main theories, as there is not enough data to prove a
clear relation to other languages.

The Korean-Japanese theory: This theory suggests that Korean and Japanese are related. It has
several supporters, but recently also many linguists that oppose such relation.

The Altaic theory: This (today obsolete) theory suggests that that Japanese is related to Turkic,
Mongolic and Tungusic. Today most linguists agree that this is wrong. Most even say that the
Altaic family itself is only a areal group.

The Austronesian theory: This theory suggests that Japanese is related to languages like Malay,
Indonesian, Javanese, Polynesian. It also has some supporters. Most agree that there is Austronesian
influence in Japanese, but they are not sure if Japanese itself is Austronesian.

The Austroasiatic theory: This theory suggests that Japanese is related to languages like
Vietnamese, Khmer or Mon. It has some supporters and recently got supported by several linguistic
and genetic Data.

The Sinitic theory: A (unlikely) theory proposed by some Japanese linguists. They suggest that
Japanese is related to ancient proto-Chinese or Burmese.

3. The isolated theory is the best one to claim the title of scientific theory, since it’s the most
sufficient and the other theories are now either obsolete or don’t have enough clues.

4. How do you understand “isolating language” and “language isolate”?

Language where words, consisting of a single morpheme, where nouns and verbs have no ending,
are more common, although its extent varies, and syntax relies heavily on rigid word order or
auxiliaries, is called “isolating language”. A language is said to be more isolating than another if it
has a lower morpheme per word ratio.

A language isolate, on the other hand, is language that cannot be classified into larger language
families, a natural language, that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common
with any other language. It is not the descendant of any ancestral language which has other known
descendants or daughter languages. Unclassified languages are different from language isolates in
that they have no demonstrable genetic relationships to other languages due to a lack of sufficient
data. In order to be considered a language isolate, a language needs to have sufficient data for
comparisons with other languages through methods of historical-comparative linguistics to show
that it does not have any genetic relationships.

5. Since linguists do not always agree on whether a genetic relationship has been demonstrated, it is
often disputed whether a language is an isolate. To what conclusions do they come?

There are some cases of disputes between scholars on whether or not the language is an isolate.
Some languages once seen as isolates may be reclassified as small families because their genetic
relationship to other languages has been established. One of such cases is the dispute about
Japanese language. Since Japanese cannot be easily proven to belong to any language family, most
scholars consider it a language isolate. The only languages that Japanese is related to are the
languages spoken in Ryukyu islands lying South–Southwest of Japan, but the linguistic affiliation
of the Ryukyuan languages is not known either. According to some accounts, Japanese and the
Ryukyuan languages form Japanese–Ryukyuan language family. It has been proposed that Japanese
may be genetically related to Korean, but that has not been proven either. Studies of Japanese have
showed that Japanese contains Altaic and Austronesian elements: the phonological system is closer
to that of Austronesian languages (Alpatov 1998), but the archaic lexicon seems to have more
Altaic elements (ibid.). This led to the hypothesis that Japanese (or, more precisely, the ancestor of
Japanese) was created as a result of mixing of two languages: the substratum language of Japan,
which possibly was Austronesian, and the language of relatively recent newcomers, which possibly
was Altaic (Shibatani 1992, Vance 2001). Thus, according to this theory, Japanese would be an old
creole language. (mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time).
Another case of reclassified language is Korean. The language has a few extinct relatives which—
along with the Jeju language (Jejuan) of Jeju Island and Korean itself—form the compact Koreanic
language family. Even so, Jejuan and Korean are not mutually intelligible with each other. The
linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in contemporary Northeast China. The
various forms of Korean are conventionally described as "dialects" of a single Korean language, but
breaks in intelligibility justify viewing them as a small family of two or three languages.