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Resources >About Languages

Japanese

Spoken Japanese

Linguistically, Japan is nearly a homogenous nation, of which over 99% of its population spoke the same language. However, Japanese also has many dialects, called hogen. These dialects can be divided as follows:

The Eastern dialects: The dialects of Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto and the eastern part of Chubu.

The Western dialects: The dialestcs of the western part of Chubu (including Nagoya City), Kansai (including Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe Cities), Chugoku, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa.

Primarily, the Japanese common language was built on the dialects of the Kansai region, but since the 17th century, it has become closer to the dialects of Tokyo in the Kanto region, as Japan's political and economic centre gradually moved from Kyoto and Osaka to Edo and present Tokyo. Generally, all Japanese can understand each other even if they speak different dialects

What is less outstanding but worthy of emphasis is the Ainu language, not regarded as a Japanese dialect but an independent language. This language is used by indigenous peoples living on the Hokkaido, a northern island of Japan. They are ethnically and culturally different from the main Japanese population.

Honorific language: Keigo

There are several levels of politeness in the Japanese language: a colloquial, a more polite, and a very polite, honorific level (keigo). Keigo demonstrates the degree of respect that the speaker pays to the listener. Its main functions are: to do honor to the listener, to be formal, to express a humble attitude, and to maintain class and cultivation.

Basically, very humble expressions are used when referring to yourself and very honorific ones or referring to the person you are addressing. This involves the speech in different levels and a wide range of words and expressions for the purpose of producing just the desired degree of politeness, where a simple sentence could be expressed in more than 20 different ways, depending on the status of the speaker relative to the person being addressed.

Keigo is classified into three types: sonkeigo, kenjougo and teineigo

Sonkeigo is the expression to use when the listener is in a higher position than the speaker.
Kenjougo is the expression to use when the speaker is in a lower position than the listener.
Teineigo is used by the speaker only to express politeness to the listener.

It is important to be conscious of speaker's position in Japanese society. For example, one is supposed to speak in an honorific language to people such as customers, teachers and elders.

Japanese writing system and usage

Kanji
Written Japanese uses about 50,000 Chinese characters, or kanji. In 1981, in an effort to read and write Japanese easier, the Japanese government introduced the joyo kanji hyo (List of Chinese Characters for General Use), which covers 1,945 regular characters, plus 166 special characters used only for people's names. All government documents, newspapers, textbooks and other publications for non-specialists use only these kanji.

Hiragana
The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana is also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, i.e. adverbs, some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obsolete. Sometimes, it is used to write words normally written with katakana for looking more Feminine, particularly in comic books and cartoons for young girls. The children's video games texts are often written completely in either hiragana or katakana.

Katakana
The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was initially regarded as Men’s Writing. Primarily, Katakana is used to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, and foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English).

Romaji (Roman letters)
Romaji is the standard way of transliterating Japanese into the Latin alphabet. In daily written Japanese, it is used to write numbers and abbreviations as well as in dictionaries, text books and phrase books for foreign learners of Japanese.

Modern Japanese
Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana and katakana known as the kana, plus kanji. Wherein, the kanji designates the chief meaningful words of the language-nouns, verbs, and adjectives and the kana designates suffixes, particles, conjunctions, and other grammatical forms. Romaji can also be used in the modern Japanese texts (i.e. Roman letters) as the standard way in writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet, non-Japanese words written in their own script and various symbols known as kigo.

A sample text in Japanese
kanji are in red, hiragana in black and katakana in blue

The same text written entirely in hiragana and katakana

Romaji transliteration of the text

Kapuseru Hoteru
Kaku shitsu ga kapuseru no kata kani hoteru. Shuden ni nori okureta sarariman nado ga tagai takushi dai o haratte kitaku suru yori yasuku sumu koto kara, tegaru ni riyo shite iru

Japanese and the internet
In the process of typing Japanese on computers, most people, including Japanese and non-Japanese, use romaji, where romaji is converted to kanji, hiragana or katakana with the help of the input software. Possibly, a Japanese keyboard makes for successful typing of hiragana or katakana, but few people are conversant with this method. The application used to convert the phonetic Hiragana characters to the mixed Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana text is called the Japanese Front End Processor (FEP), which can be either built in the operating system or purchased separately by the user.

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