Japanese, The Spoken Language – Part 1 (Yale Language Series)

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The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as the Ainu, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance. Incorporating vocabulary from European languages, gairaigo, began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by words from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French, and English. Today most borrowings are from English. History records that people in Hokkaidō, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands spoke Ainu languages, [ citation needed] but there are also places in and around Tōhoku whose names derive from Ainu languages. According to 16th-century records, Ainu languages had no written form. [ citation needed] Only from the 19th-century did the Ainu languages begin to use Katakana. [ citation needed] Orok language [ edit ] There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] Formerly, standard Japanese in writing ( 文語, bungo, "literary language") was different from colloquial language ( 口語, kōgo). The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kōgo gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. Bungo still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kōgo is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.

When NASA launched the 'Voyager 1 & 2' spacecraft in 1977, they put on board golden discs containing the sights and sounds of Earth, including greetings in 55 of the world’s most widely understood languages. These are currently travelling through space! The terminology is at times non-standard – for example, 形容動詞 are referred to as na- nominals, as they behave grammatically almost identically to 名詞 (nouns), which are clearly nominals. This choice has some support in Japanese scholarship, though traditionally these words are referred to as " na-adjectives" or "adjectival nouns". Similarly, the gender differences in spoken Japanese are referred to as blunt/gentle, rather than male/female. [1] Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War. During the period of post-war occupation (and influenced by the views of some U.S. officials), various schemes including the complete abolition of kanji and exclusive use of rōmaji were considered. The jōyō kanji ("common use kanji", originally called tōyō kanji [kanji for general use]) scheme arose as a compromise solution. Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle -ka is added. For example, ii desu ( いいです) "It is OK" becomes ii desu-ka ( いいですか。) "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle -no ( の) is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: Dōshite konai-no? "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: Kore wa? "(What about) this?"; O-namae wa? ( お名前は？) "(What's your) name?".a b Statistics, in Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2023). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (26thed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is not an L1. Arabic speakers first learn their respective local dialect. MSA is acquired through formal education. [10] Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Lao, Malay, Nepali, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favour of a national language. [6] Top languages by population Ethnologue (2023) American FactFinder". Factfinder.census.gov. Archived from the original on 2020-02-12 . Retrieved 2013-02-01. The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 26th edition edition of Ethnologue published in 2023. [7] Entries Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section. Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers [7] Language The approach is based on Jorden's decades of experience in teaching Japanese and pedagogical research, and was preceded by her 1960s textbook, Beginning Japanese, which JSL supersedes.Another uncommon feature of the text is that it emphasizes Japanese pitch accent in the words, according to standard Japanese. Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o- or go- as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a polite speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu to show politeness. If I recall more audio/supplemental links for specific academically-oriented courses, I'll post them. In my experience, "Menschen" and "Sicher!" are used by some branches of the Goethe Institut for their classes, although they are kind of mass-market in that the books are usually available at any large bookstore in the German-speaking world, and not just those at an university. I haven't seen the "Schritte plus Neu" series used anywhere, although it's very similar to "Menschen" and so I would expect it to be used in other branches of the Goethe Institut at the least. The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (politically part of Kagoshima), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time, [26] most likely the spoken form of Classical Japanese, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began decline during the late Meiji period. [27] The Ryūkyūan languages are classified by UNESCO as 'endangered', as young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand the languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryūkyūan languages, and is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands. [28]

Human communication might have been sparked by involuntary sounds such as "ouch" or "eek" or by communal activities such as heaving or carrying heavy objects, coordinated by shouts of "yo-he-ho", etc Ertl, John, ed. (2008). Multiculturalism in the new Japan: crossing the boundaries within. New York: Berghahn Books. p.57. ISBN 9780857450258. Japanese words and words derived from Japanese in other languages at Wiktionary, Wikipedia's sibling project

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin script (or romaji in Japanese) is used to a certain extent, such as for imported acronyms and to transcribe Japanese names and in other instances where non-Japanese speakers need to know how to pronounce a word (such as "ramen" at a restaurant). Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as 統一 tōitsu ("unification"). Japanese is a member of the Japonic language family, which also includes the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is often called a language isolate. [29] Globalisation and cultural homogenisation mean that many of the world’s languages are in danger of vanishing. UNESCO has identified 2,500 languages which it claims are at risk of extinction Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN 978-0-521-26438-9. In 2023, there were around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.1 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey. Hindi and Spanish accounted for the third and fourth most widespread languages that year.