Japan

Japan language

Japan's flag

The State of Japan is an island country in East Asia, whose capital is Tokyo. It has a population of 126 million inhabitants (10th) and an area of ​​377,973 km 2 (61st). Its human development index is very high (19th) and its official currency is the Japanese yen. But what language is spoken in Japan?

What language do they speak in Japan?

Japan does not have any official language.

However, Japanese is the de facto official language, as it is spoken by 99% of the population.

In addition to Japanese, several Japonic languages ​​are spoken in the Ryūkyū Islands, such as Amami (11,800 speakers), Kunigami (5,000), Okinawan (984,000), Miyako (67,700), Yaeyama (47,600), Yonaguni (400). Despite the fact that today there are few children who learn these languages, in recent times local governments are trying to make the people aware of traditional languages.

In education, English is the most learned foreign language, with several years required. However, much of the population does not have a fluid level. To a lesser degree, other languages ​​studied are Russian, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

signal japanese portuguese english japan

The most common immigrant languages ​​are Chinese (150,000), Spanish (108,000), and English (74,000). There is also a large number of Portuguese speakers.

The Japanese language

Japanese (日本語) is an agglutinative language , that is, words are formed by joining independent monemes. The Japanese language presents an honorific language system, which is made up of elements (verb forms and vocabulary) that allow showing respect, social distance (or proximity), and difference (or similarity) in rank.

japanese keyboard

The Japanese writing system uses a combination of kanji sinograms (characters adopted from Chinese) and the kana syllabary. Also, the Latin alphabet is sometimes employed; for example, for matters such as company names, such as Honda, Toyota and Sony. To write the numbers, there are two ways: with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) or with Chinese numerals (一,二,三). The former are more common in horizontal writing, while the latter are more common in vertical writing.

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