Japanese · 日本語

About Japanese

Language family

Japonic

Where it's spoken

Japan

Speakers

roughly 125 million speakers

Japanese belongs to the small Japonic family alongside the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa; it has no confirmed close relatives outside Japan, despite older theories linking it to Korean or the disputed 'Altaic' languages. Chinese contact from the 5th century onward gave Japanese its kanji characters and a large layer of borrowed vocabulary, which it combined with two native syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. It is written in a mix of all three systems in ordinary text.