Japanese Language – History and Geographical Distribution

Japanese is believed to be linked to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian and other languages, but also shows similarities to Austronesian languages like Polynesian.

The Japanese by and large believe their language to be a highly unique language—some believe it to be unlike any other language in existence. Western linguists believe that Japanese is a language clearly related to other Northern Asian languages, but there is a fair amount of disagreement among them. Suffice it to say that Japanese is the only human language where we can't quite decide where it came from or what other languages it is related to.

Almost all linguists believe that Japanese is an Altaic language, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the fact that the Yayoi people seem to have migrated from Korea. A fair number of Japanese linguists, however, believe that Japanese is an Austronesian language. These alternative views have given rise to three theories concerning the origin of Japanese:

1. In the Western model, Japanese was derived from a language spoken in northern Asia that split off into several languages, such as Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish. The earliest peoples of Japan probably spoke this language, but the Yayoi certainly spoke this language. By the end of the Yayoi period (300 A.D.), this Altaic language was the dominant language on the islands. This language was in part influenced by the Pacific Island languages (the Austronesian languages) that surrounded the islands of Japan and thus formed an Austronesian substratum in Japanese.

2. The Jomon spoke an Austronesian language and the Yayoi introduced an Altaic language. This Altaic language combined with the Austronesian language spoken on the islands to form a unique hybrid, Japanese, which became the dominant language in Japan. In this model, there are two possibilities: Japanese is an Altaic language with an Austronesian substratum or Japanese is an Austronesian language with an Altaic substratum.

3. Japanese was originally a language related to Tibetan or a language related to Tamil that was introduced into Japan during the great migration of Southeast Asian peoples four or five thousand years ago. This language combined with an Altaic and an Austronesian language to form the contemporary language.

However, Japanese linguists argue that even though the written form of Japanese language uses Chinese (kanji) characters, it is distinct from Chinese and Korean and contend that it is not related to any other language.

The Japanese language became known as early as the 8^th century when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled. The earliest attestation of Japanese is in a Chinese document from 252 A.D. Even though the Japanese language is found to be having similarities with different languages the Chinese language changed it profoundly as it introduced new ways of thinking and new ways of expressing that thought.

In fact, most Japanese words are derived from Chinese—over sixty percent, to be precise. The situation is similar to English in which some sixty percent of English words are derived from Latin and only a minority of English words comes from original English.

Since the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), Japanese has been greatly influenced by Western languages. Technology in particular has introduced a host of new words and expressions. In the realm of grammar, some writers have written Japanese in such a way to make translation into English easier. As a result, they've significantly changed some grammatical constructions to fit in more closely with European languages.

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken elsewhere by over 130 million people. Japanese is the de facto official language of Japan, which is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyōjungoor or standard Japanese, and kyōtsūgo or the common language spoken by the people in casual situations (i.e. colloquial). As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred.

Japanese has borrowed a vast number of words from Chinese and particularly during the last few centuries, many English and other European language loan words have also been introduced into the Japanese language.

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