JAPANESE

Spoken by the people of Japan, Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [?iho?ɡo]) is the primary language of the Japonic linguistic family. There are around 128 million speakers of it, mostly in Japan, the only nation in which it is the official language, and in the Japanese diaspora across the globe.

The Hachijō language, which is classed differently, and the languages of Ryukyu are also members of the Japonic family. Numerous attempts have been made to place the Japonic languages in the same family as the Ainu, Koreanic, Austroasiatic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these alliances have been widely embraced.

The prehistory of the language and its initial appearance in Japan are little understood.

A few Japanese terms were found in Chinese writings dating back to the third century AD, but extensive Old Japanese manuscripts did not surface until the eighth century. Early Middle Japanese phonology was impacted by massive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary that entered the language starting in the Heian period (794–1185). There were significant grammatical modifications and the emergence of European loanwords in late Middle Japanese (1185–1600). Throughout the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th–mid 19th century), the foundation of the standard dialect shifted from the Kansai region to the Edo region (modern-day Tokyo). Words with English roots have become more common and loanwords from European languages have expanded dramatically since Japan's self-imposed seclusion ended in 1853.