Japanese: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Japanese belongs to a small family of its own, usually called Japonic. Its only close relatives are the Ryukyuan languages, spoken on Okinawa and the islands around it, which are distant enough from Japanese that speakers of the two cannot simply understand each other. Links to Korean or to the languages of Central Asia have often been proposed, and none has been proven.

A widely held view is that the language came to the islands from the Asian mainland more than two thousand years ago, together with rice farming. What is certain is that it later took a huge number of words from Chinese — but not its grammar. Japanese and Chinese are written with many of the same characters and are built in completely different ways: Chinese never changes the form of a word, Japanese hangs endings on almost everything.

A short history

The oldest Japanese texts that survive date from the eighth century, among them the Kojiki, a record of old myths and chronicles finished in 712. They are written entirely in Chinese characters, some used for their meaning and some only for their sound.

In the Heian period, from the late eighth to the twelfth century, the court at Kyoto developed the kana scripts, and some of the greatest works of the time were written by women at court. The best known is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, from the early eleventh century, often called one of the first novels in the world.

From the sixteenth century, Portuguese traders and missionaries brought the first European words, and during the long period when Japan limited contact with the West, Dutch merchants in Nagasaki were the main window onto European science. After 1868, in the Meiji era, Japan modernised at speed: a standard language was built on the speech of Tokyo, and scholars made thousands of kanji words for Western ideas — new coinages, or old Chinese words given a new meaning — such as 経済(けいざい) for economy and 哲学(てつがく) for philosophy. Many of them were later taken over by Chinese and Korean.

After 1945 the script was simplified and the number of kanji taught at school was fixed by an official list; the current one holds just over two thousand. Since then the great new source of words has been English.

Where it is spoken today

Japanese is spoken almost only in Japan, and nearly everybody in Japan speaks it. Curiously, no law names it the official language — nobody ever felt the need. Outside Japan the largest communities are the descendants of emigrants, above all in Brazil, where many families arrived in the early twentieth century, and in Hawaii and the rest of the United States.

Everybody learns the standard language at school and hears it on television, but the regional dialects are alive. The best known is that of the Kansai region around Osaka and Kyoto, familiar to the whole country from comedy: あかん for “no good” instead of だめ, ほんま for “really” instead of 本当(ほんとう), and おおきに as an old way of saying thank you. Dialects of the far north and of the south-west can be hard to follow even for other Japanese.

The two regions differ in melody, too. Japanese words carry a pattern of high and low pitch, and the patterns of Tokyo and Osaka are often not the same, so the same word can sound quite different in the two cities.

Three scripts, and how they came about

Japan had no writing of its own. Chinese characters reached it from the mainland, much of it by way of Korea, and were in use by about the fifth century. The problem was that Chinese has no endings and Japanese is full of them. The solution was to borrow some characters only for their sound, and over the centuries these sound-characters were simplified into two scripts of their own.

Hiragana grew out of flowing, handwritten forms of whole characters: あ comes from 安(あん). Katakana grew out of single parts of characters, which monks wrote in the margins of Buddhist texts as reading aids: カ is the left half of 加(か). Each kana stands for a syllable, not a letter, and each script has a little under fifty basic signs.

Today all three work together. Kanji carry the core of a word, hiragana write the endings and the little grammar words, and katakana are used for words from other languages, foreign names, and emphasis. In 私(わたし)はコーヒーを飲(の)みます。, “I drink coffee”, you can see all three at once. Most kanji have two kinds of reading: a native Japanese one, as in 山(やま), mountain, and one borrowed from Chinese, as in 富士山(ふじさん), Mount Fuji.

Latin letters, called romaji, appear on signs and in names, and they are how most people type: you write nihongo on the keyboard and the computer turns it into 日本語(にほんご). Japanese is written without spaces between words, and novels and newspapers are still often printed in vertical columns, read from top to bottom and from right to left.

Words it gave and words it took

English has picked up many Japanese words: 寿司(すし)sushi津波(つなみ)tsunamiカラオケkaraoke絵文字(えもじ)emoji Karaoke is half Japanese and half English — kara, “empty”, and oke, short for orchestra. Emoji has nothing to do with “emotion”: it is e, picture, and moji, written character. Even “tycoon” comes from Japanese, from a title once used for the shogun.

Japanese itself has borrowed in three great waves. From Chinese came a very large part of the vocabulary, especially the learned and formal words. From Portuguese came a handful of words that stayed, such as パン, bread. And from English, especially since 1945, came a flood that is still growing — usually shortened to fit Japanese sounds: パソコンis a personal computerスマホa smartphoneコンビニa convenience store

Some words look English and were made in Japan. A サラリーマン, “salary man”, is an office worker, and nobody in Britain or America would use the word that way. A few come from German, through medicine, mountaineering and student life: アルバイト, from Arbeit, means a part-time job.

What surprises an English speaker

The verb comes at the end, and the little words that say who does what come after the noun rather than before it. There are no articles, and most nouns have no plural: 本(ほん) is a book or books, and the context decides. The subject is often left out entirely when it is clear — “went yesterday?” is a complete, natural question.

Politeness is part of the grammar. The same verb has a plain form for friends and a polite form for strangers, and there are special verbs for talking respectfully about others and modestly about yourself. Things are counted with counters chosen by their shape, and there are two sets of numbers, one native and one from Chinese.

The sounds are friendlier than many expect: five vowels, and syllables that mostly end in a vowel. What matters, and what English ears miss, is length. おばさんis an auntおばあさんa grandmother — the only difference is a long vowel And instead of stress, Japanese uses pitch: in Tokyo speech, 雨(あめ), rain, falls from high to low, while 飴(あめ), a sweet, rises.