21 Facts About Japanese language

Late Middle Japanese language saw extensive grammatical changes and the first appearance of European loanwords.

Japanese language has a complex system of honorifics, with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

Japanese language writing system combines Chinese characters, known as, with two unique syllabaries derived by the Japanese language from the more complex Chinese characters: and.

Late Middle Japanese language covers the years from 1185 to 1600, and is normally divided into two sections, roughly equivalent to the Kamakura period and the Muromachi period, respectively.

The later forms of Late Middle Japanese language are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese language phonology than for previous forms.

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Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include pan and tabako, both from Portuguese.

However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryukyuan languages as dialects of Japanese.

Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryukyuan languages.

Since Japanese first gained the consideration of linguists in the late 19th century, attempts have been made to show its genealogical relation to languages or language families such as Ainu, Korean, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Uralic, Altaic, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian.

Japanese language has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version.

In some cases Japanese language relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group; and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group.

Japanese language nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect.

The rentaishi in Modern Japanese language are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to directly modifying nouns.

Note: The subtle difference between wa and ga in Japanese cannot be derived from the English language as such, because the distinction between sentence topic and subject is not made there.

Japanese language has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.

Humble Japanese language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group whilst honorific Japanese language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and their group.

In short, the register used in Japanese language to refer to the person, speech, or actions of any particular individual varies depending on the relationship between the speaker and listener, as well as depending on the relative status of the speaker, listener, and third-person referents.

Original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called yamato kotoba, which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wago.

Japanese language emperors gave an official rank to Chinese scholars and spread the use of Chinese characters from the 7th century to the 8th century.

At first, the Japanese language wrote in Classical Chinese, with Japanese language names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds.

Japanese language students begin to learn kanji from their first year at elementary school.