Welcome to the Langfocus channel,

and my name is Paul.

Today's topic is, The Japanese language.

Or ❝Nihongo (日本語)❞ as it's called in Japanese.

Japanese has around 126 million native speakers.

Making it the 9th most spoken language in the world,

if we focus on native speakers alone.

It's spoken mainly in the North-East Asian nation of Japan.

And also to a limited extent in some emigrant communities

and among some elderly people living in Japan's

former colonies like Korea and Taiwan.

Japanese belongs to the "Japonic" language family

which also includes the endangered "Ryukyuan" languages

of Okinawa and the Amami Islands.

But the early history of Japanese and

its relationship to other languages is largely unknown.

There are theories that the Japanese and Korean languages

share a common ancestor.

And there are theories that Japanese and Korean

are part of a wider language family

called the Altaic language family.

Which also includes the Turkic languages,

Mongolian, and the Tungusic languages.

But, the Altaic language family, and the connection between

Japanese and Korean are theoretic.

They're hotly debated and are not generally accepted.

There are also theories, that Japanese arose from

contact between the language of the Yayoi people,

who migrated from the North-East Asian mainland

Into Japan 2- 3000 years go.

And the language or languages of the Jomon people

who were already living there?

But, the nature of the language is that these 2 groups of people

spoke is not clearly known?

Japanese was not a written language in

its early history, during the Yayoi period.

Which leaves us very little evidence of what it was

actually like during that time.

In the 3rd century CE, the Yamato state in Japan

established relations with China. And the next 600 years

would be a period of heavy Chinese influence.

During which the rulers and the elite thought that

emulates many aspects of Chinese culture.

Written Chinese was probably introduced to Japan

in the 4th Century.

And since Japanese had no written form,

"Classical Chinese became the first literary language" used by the elite.

Later, "Chinese characters" began being adapted to "write Japanese."

The earliest examples we have of Japanese

writing are from the 8th century

and there are 2 forms. Kanbun (漢文)

Kanbun (漢文)

And, Man'yōgana (万葉仮名)

Man'yōgana (万葉仮名)

kanbun was the writing of Japanese in "Classical Chinese style,"

using Chinese characters to represent

the meaning of Japanese words.

these texts were essentially Chinese,

but were "intended to be readable in Japanese."

Man'yōgana was a way of writing Japanese

entirely in Chinese characters, with

most of the "characters representing the phonetic sound" of

the underlying Japanese syllables.

For example,

The Japanese word for "mountain" - yama -

was written using these 2 Chinese characters:

for their phonetic value,

rather than using the Chinese character.

Which means mountain, which is the character used today?

And not only one Chinese character was used for each sound.

Numerous different characters could be

used to represent the same sound.

For example,

the syllables "ka" could be represented by

any of the following characters:

Writing Japanese characters phonetically using Chinese characters

that had no connection to the meaning,

must have felt like a lot of unnecessary hard work.

So, 2 systems of simplified phonetic characters

developed from the Man'yōgana system

in the 8th and 9th centuries

in order to simplify the writing process.

These 2 systems were ❝Hiragana (ひらがな)❞ and ❝Katakana (カタカナ)❞

one of the main uses of these

new ❝Kana (仮名)❞ systems was to annotate ❝Kanbun (漢文)❞ text.

So, that Japanese speakers could read these classical Chinese

or Chinese style texts as though they were Japanese.

Chinese characters represented the meaning of the content words

while Kana provided the pronunciation,

as well as the grammatical elements and inflections

that were not present in Chinese.

Some diacritic marks also indicated how to change the word order

when reading the text in Japanese.

This method of annotating Chinese texts with "Kana"

was the precursor to the Modern Japanese writing system.

Through this process of trying to make written Chinese language

fit with the spoken Japanese language,

a huge amount of Chinese vocabulary entered Japanese.

Chinese characters were sometimes

annotated to be pronounced with their Chinese pronunciation.

Known as ❝ON-YOMI (音読み)❞ and sometimes pronounced

as a native Japanese word with a similar meaning.

These pronunciations are known as ❝KUN-YOMI (訓読み)❞

Such Chinese words have become an integral part of Japanese,

comprising 60% of the total vocabulary (particularly in writing).

During the Late Middle Japanese period,

from the year 1185 to 1600.

Japanese continued to develop and moved

closer towards Modern Japanese

phonologically in particular.

Towards the end of this time period, In the year 1543

the first Europeans visited Japan.

And some European vocabulary, entered Japanese

through contact with traders and missionaries.

This contact mostly came to a halt

during the ❝period of national isolation❞

from 1603-1853.

During this time, contact with foreigners was strictly limited to

a couple of specific places, like the Dutch trading post

❝Dejima❞ in Nagasaki.

A significant number of Dutch loanwords

did entered Japanese during this time period,

some of them common everyday words.

Like; "garasu (ガラス)," from "glas."

"ranpu (ランプ)," from "lamp."

"kōhī (コーヒー)," from "koffie."

"koppu (コップ)," from "kop" (cup).

These words are examples of ❝gairaigo (外来語)❞

loanwords aside from Chinese borrowings and compounds

normally loanwords from European languages.

Which are normally written in Katakana.

This period of isolation took place during the Edo Period

during which the capital moved from Kansai to Edo.

Present-day Tokyo. And the Edo dialect

became the standard variety of Japanese.

After this period of isolation ended in 1853,

interaction with the outside world greatly increased.

And this affected the Japanese language

as it entered the Meiji Period.

The number of gairaigo began to Increase.

But even more than that

many new compound words were created from Chinese characters,

and pronounced using their Chinese pronunciation,

the "ON-yomi" pronunciation.

These new compounds words, were created to

represent new Western concepts,

as well as advanced academic vocabulary in the arts,

sciences, math, and technology.

These new words that were coined using Chinese characters

are referred to as "wasei kango (和製漢語)"

Which means something like, "Japan-made Chinese words."

Since the end of World WarⅡ,

Japanese has adopted a large number of gairaigo,

in particular from English.

Some of these represent everyday modern concepts, like;

コンピューター (konpyūtā) "computer."

And others represent specialized vocabulary of

academia and technology.

During the Meiji period, such specialized vocabulary

would have probably been created from Chinese compounds.

But in recent decades, English has been a much bigger

source of new vocabularies.

Varieties of Japanese.

Standard Japanese today is based on the dialect of Tokyo.

But there are also numerous unique and colorful

regional and local dialects as well.

There are the distinctive dialects of the Kansai region,

which other Japanese people often associate with comedy.

Then there are the dialects of Tohoku

(which a lot of people have trouble understanding).

And there are the dialects of Okinawa

which retains some "elements of" the area's

old "Ryukyuan" languages. And many more.

Almost everywhere you go in Japan

there is a distinctive local dialect.

The dialects of today are much closer to Standard Japanese

than they were in the past.

There are still some people who speak full-on traditional dialects:

in particular older people, working class people,

and people in the countryside.

Basically, if someone meets at least two of those criteria

that person probably uses much more

dialectal speech than a lot of other people.

The majority of people speak something

close to Standard Japanese.

But, with some elements from the traditional dialect.

And when speaking politely to strangers or

informal situations people tend to avoid dialectal speech.

So, what is Japanese like?

phonology.

The basics of Japanese phonology are quite simple.

There are only 5 vowels in Japanese.

あ a

い i

う u

え e

お o

There are also long versions of these vowels.

あー ā

いー ī

うー ū

えー ē

おー ō

The distinction between short and long vowels is

important to the meaning of words.

Japanese vowels are always fully articulated, and are not reduced

like they sometimes are in English.

The consonants of Japanese are for the most part

similar to those of English,

and cause few problems for learners.

Japanese syllables basically all end in a vowel.

This makes pronunciation fairly simple.

Because there are a few consonant clusters.

You normally don't have to pronounce

multiple consonants side by side.

There are a couple of exceptions to this,

one is doubled consonants.

For example the word,

学校 "school" gakkou

if we pronounce these characters separately they are

ga"k"u + "k"ou

But because the consonants in these 2 syllables, is the same,

they merge together, as 1 lengthened consonant.

Written with a small letter, 2 between them,

to indicate that you hold the consonant

for twice as long.

you don't say "gaku-kou"

But, ga"kk"ou が "っ" こう

another exception is having a nasal sound

followed by another consonant.

The nasal sound ん

Functions as its own syllable without a vowel.

So, we have words like,

かんぱい 乾杯 (kanpai)

Which means, cheers.

To be completely precise, each Japanese Kana character,

represents a rhythmic unit called a "mora", rather than a syllable.

So, in the word;

Ka-n-pa-i かんぱい

There are 4 distinct, mora.

But if we think of it in terms of syllables,

It has just 2 syllables.

And in this word,

ga-k-ko-u がっこう

There are 4 moras.

But, in terms of syllables, it just has 2.

So, there are a couple of situations,

when a syllable doesn't end in a vowel.

But, for the most part, syllables end in vowels.

This becomes very clear, when you look at some of the gairaigo

foreign loanwords in Japanese.

in English there's "cake," but in Japanese it's―

ケーキ (kēki) With the vowel, "e" at the end.

And notice the long vowel is much more distinct in Japanese.

Another example, in English ”hard disk" in Japanese―

ハードディスク (hādodisuku)

And here's a bit of a wild example,

how do you say "McDonald's" in Japanese?

マクドナルド (makudonarudo)

This aspect of Japanese phonology, may make it a little bewildered to

use loanwords from English, or other languages.

But it makes it easier to pronounce native Japanese words.

One aspect of Japanese phonology