History of the Japanese Language

The Japanese language is spoken by more than 130 million people worldwide, with the vast majority residing in Japan. The language is especially interesting for the complexity of forms used to demonstrate the relative social positions of the speaker and listener. A system of honorifics to indicate rank and a variety of verb forms geared to each level of the hierarchy gives Japanese its unique structure. Another unique feature of Japanese is the tripartite system of writing used to record the language. Japanese uses a combination of kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana (modified Chinese characters), and katakana (simplified kanji) to write the tongue.

The Japanese language emerged sometime around the eighth century AD though the exact timing is not known. At this stage the earliest Japanese writings in what is now known as Old Japanese are found. Before this, Japan used Classical Chinese as its primary written language, and the influence of Chinese over the Japanese language extended for several centuries and can be seen today both in the Chinese-derived characters used to write Japanese and the extensive number of Chinese loan words found in Japanese. At this stage, Japanese lacked dipthongs and syllable-final consonants, both of which would come later.

Late Old Japanese was used from 794-1185, the Heian Period, in which simplified characters began to replace classical Chinese characters in the written form of Japanese. From 1185 to the 16th century, Middle Japanese continued the language’s evolution. During this time Portuguese loanwords entered Japanese, and many older grammatical forms gave way to the forms now used in Modern Japanese. Scholarly knowledge of Middle Japanese is comparatively strong because Portuguese missionaries studied the language extensively and preserved records of its sound and usage.

During the modern period, literary Japanese (“bungo”) differed from spoken Japanese (“kogo”) in both vocabulary and grammar. This changed after 1900 when the spoken form replaced the literary form for nearly all uses. Today, spoken and written Japanese use the same words and vocabulary, though there are dozens of contemporary dialects in use. Standardization through mass media and education has begun to erode some of these dialects, but many Japanese today speak both Standard Japanese (the language of the capital) and a local dialect.