15 Facts About Katakana

Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.

Katakana was originally created by Japanese Buddhist monks in order to better transliterate Indian texts and works of art transmitted directly from India or through Buddhism via China.

Katakana are used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds – for example, ????, the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell.

Katakana are often used for transcription of Japanese company names.

Katakana was used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems – before the introduction of multibyte characters – in the 1980s.

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Katakana is used to indicate the on'yomi of a kanji in a kanji dictionary.

Katakana is sometimes used instead of hiragana as furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original.

Katakana are sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent.

Katakana is used to denote the fact that a character is speaking a foreign language, and what is displayed in katakana is only the Japanese "translation" of their words.

Katakana is used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ryu of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku ensembles with koto, shamisen and shakuhachi.

Katakana is commonly used by Japanese linguists to write the Ainu language.

Katakana is used as a phonetic guide for the Okinawan language, unlike the various other systems to represent Okinawan, which use hiragana with extensions.

Katakana was developed in the 9th century by Buddhist monks in Nara in order to transliterate texts and works of arts from India, by taking parts of man'yogana characters as a form of shorthand, hence this kana is so-called.

Katakana is heavily influenced by Sanskrit due to the original creators having travelled and worked with Indian Buddhists based in East Asia during the era.

Katakana was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.