Japanese 日本語 (Nihongo)

Irasshai-masu - Welcome

Japanese is spoken as a first language by 122 million and as a second language by over 1 million people in Japan. It is also spoken in American Samoa, Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Dominican Republic, Germany, Guam, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and USA (Ethnologue). The number of Japanese speakers worldwide is estimated at close to 130 million people.

There have been numerous attempts to establish a genetic relationship between Japanese and other languages and language families. The most popular theory is that Japanese, like Korean, is a member of the Altaic language family. This would suggest that Japanese and Korean are related, albeit in an extremely remote way. Although Ainu is spoken in northern Japan, there is no evidence that there is a relationship between the two languages, and Ainu, for the moment, is considered to be a language isolate.

Japanese is the official language of Japan. All education, media, business, and government are conducted in Japanese. In addition to Japanese, there are 14 Ryukyuan languages spoken in Okinawa and neighbouring Ryukyu islands. These are mutually unintelligible with Japanese and, in most cases, also with each other.

In the past, there has been some disagreement about the status of the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands and some islands that are part of the Kagoshima Prefecture. Since these languages are unintelligible to Japanese speakers as well as to speakers of other Ryukyuan varieties, some scholars used to consider them to be separate languages. However, the prevailing view today is that they constitute a variety of Japanese.

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