Japanese Language

Japanese (日本語 / Nihongo) is the official language of Japan and is spoken by around 125 million people. It belongs to the Japonic language family, which includes Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages. Linguists still debate how (or whether) it is related to other language families like Korean or Altaic.

Even though Japanese is not genetically related to Chinese, its writing system borrows thousands of Chinese characters called kanji (漢字). Japanese also uses two native syllabaries:

hiragana (ひらがな / 平仮名) – for grammar and native words

katakana (カタカナ / 片仮名) – for foreign words and emphasis

Together with kanji, these make up the main writing system. The Latin alphabet is also used for acronyms and branding, while numbers are written using both Arabic and traditional Chinese numerals.