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Languages of Japan
Official
None[1]
National
Standard Japanese
Main
Standard Japanese
Indigenous
Ainu
Regional
Japanese dialects, Amami-Ōshima, Kunigami, Miyako, Okinawan, Yaeyama, Yonaguni
Minority
Bonin English, Matagi, Nivkh, Orok, Sanka, Zainichi Korean
Japanese Sign Language Amami Oshima Sign Language Miyakubo Sign Language
Keyboard layout
JIS
The most widely spoken language in Japan is Japanese, which is separated into several dialects with Tokyo dialect considered Standard Japanese.
In addition to the Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the Japonic language family, but they are separate languages,[citation needed] and are not mutually intelligible with Japanese, or with each other. All of the spoken Ryukyuan languages are classified by UNESCO as endangered.
In Hokkaidō, there is the Ainu language, which is spoken by the Ainu people, who are the indigenous people of the island. The Ainu languages, of which Hokkaidō Ainu is the only extant variety, are isolated and do not fall under any language family. Ever since the Meiji period, Japanese has become widely used among the Ainu people and consequently Ainu languages have been classified critically endangered by UNESCO.[2]
In addition, languages such as Orok, Evenki and Nivkh spoken in formerly Japanese controlled southern Sakhalin are becoming more and more endangered. After the Soviet Union took control of the region, speakers of these languages and their descendants migrated to mainland Japan and still exist in small numbers.
^"参議院法制局".
^Ertl, John, ed. (2008). Multiculturalism in the new Japan : crossing the boundaries within. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 57. ISBN 9780857450258.
and 25 Related for: Languages of Japan information
Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the...
(2004). "Japanese", Archived 2022-03-27 at the Wayback Machine in Dictionary ofLanguages: the Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages. New York:...
language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands ofJapan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally...
classification of the Japonic languages and their external relations is unclear. Linguists traditionally consider the Japonic languages to belong to an...
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Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Until the 20th century, the Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu and the now-extinct...
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Japanese language, Ryūkyūan languages are spoken in Okinawa and parts of Kagoshima in the Ryūkyū Islands. Along with Japanese, these languages are part of the...
pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels. As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese was primarily an agglutinative language with a...
The languagesof Taiwan consist of several varieties oflanguages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan...
form of the Japaneselanguage that was the standard until the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). It is based on Early Middle Japanese, the language as spoken...
placenames. Some of these languages are believed to have been Koreanic, but there is also evidence suggesting that Japonic languages were spoken in central...
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linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languagesof southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone...
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The word Japan is an exonym, and is used (in one form or another) by many languages. The Japanese names for Japan are Nihon (にほん) and Nippon (にっぽん). They...
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other languages. Other top languages are Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Persian, French, German and Japanese. Of the more than 7,000 existing languages, only...
the Japanese kokugo, or Japanese national language, other Ryukyuan languages such as Okinawan and Amami have also been referred to as dialects of Japanese...
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