Encyclopedia
Japanese is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in
Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Its recorded history goes back to the
8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of glyphs:
Chinese characters , and two syllabic scripts,
hiragana and
katakana. The
Latin alphabet is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style
Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Chinese/Japanese numberings are also commonplace.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from
Chinese, or created on Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late
19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Western languages, primarily
English.
Classification
Historical linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, the other member being Ryukyuan.
The genetic affiliation of the Japonic family is uncertain. Numerous theories have been proposed, relating it to a wide variety of other languages and families, including extinct languages spoken by historic cultures of the
Korean peninsula; the
Korean language; the Altaic languages; and the
Austronesian languages, among many others. It is also often suggested that it may be a creole language combining more than one of these. The various theories are detailed in the main article. At this point, no one theory is generally accepted as correct, and the issue is likely to remain controversial.
Geographic distribution
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken elsewhere. When Japan occupied
Korea,
Taiwan, parts of the
Chinese mainland, and various Pacific islands, locals in
those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programs. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of, or in addition to, the local languages. Japanese emigrant communities frequently employ Japanese as their primary language. Japanese emigrants can also be found in
Peru,
Australia , and the
United States . There is also a small emigrant community in Davao,
Philippines. Their descendants , however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well; many schools, both primary and secondary, offer courses.
Official status
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: or standard Japanese, and or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred.
Hyojungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.
Standard Japanese can also be divided into or "literary language," and or "oral language", which have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary.
Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until the late 1940s, and still has relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers .
Kogo is the predominant method of speaking and writing Japanese today, although
bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.
Dialects
Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to many factors, including the length of time the archipelago has been inhabited, its mountainous island terrain, and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage. Some even differ in
vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.
The main distinction in Japanese dialects is between Tokyo-type and Western-type , though Kyushu-type dialects form a smaller third group. Within each type are several subdivisions. The Western-type dialects are actually in the central region, with borders roughly formed by
Toyama,
Kyoto,
Hyogo, and
Mie Prefectures; most
Shikoku dialects are also Western-type. Dialects further west are actually of the Tokyo type. The final category of dialects are those that are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese; these dialects are spoken in
Hachijojima,
Tosa, and a very few other locations.
Dialects from peripheral regions, such as
Tohoku or Tsushima, may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The several dialects used in Kagoshima in southern
Kyushu are famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyushu as well, probably due in part to the Kagoshima dialects' peculiarities of pronunciation, which include the existence of closed syllables . The vocabulary of Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect. Kansai-ben, a group of dialects from west-central Japan, is spoken by many Japanese; the Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy.
The Ryukyuan languages, while closely related to Japanese, are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family, and are not dialects of Japanese. They are spoken in the
Ryukyu Islands and in some islands that are politically part of
Kagoshima Prefecture. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages.
Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide, due not only to
television and
radio, but also to increased mobility within Japan due to its system of roads, railways, and airports. Young people usually speak their local dialect and the standard language, though in most cases, the local dialect is influenced by the standard, and regional versions of "standard" Japanese have local-dialect influence.
Sounds
Japanese vowels are "pure" sounds, similar to their
Spanish, Greek or
Italian counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel , which is like , but
compressed instead of rounded. Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, so each one has both a short and a long version.
Some Japanese consonants have several allophones, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese up to and including the first half of the twentieth century, the phonemic sequence was palatalized and realized phonetically as , approximately
chi; however, now and are distinct, as evidenced by words like
paatii "party" and
chi "ground."
The syllabic structure and the phonotactics are very simple: the only consonant clusters allowed within a syllable consist of one of a subset of the consonants plus /j/. This type of clusters only occurs in onsets. However, consonant clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are a nasal followed a homo-organic consonant. The consonant length is also phonemic.
Grammar
Sentence structure
The basic Japanese word order is Subject Object Verb. Subject, Object, and other grammatical relations are usually marked by particles, which are suffixed to the words that they modify, and are thus properly called postpositions.
The basic sentence structure is topic-comment. For example,
Kochira-wa Tanaka-san desu. Kochira is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle
-wa. The verb is
desu, a copula, commonly translated as "to be" . As a phrase,
Tanaka-san desu is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". Thus Japanese, like
Chinese,
Korean, and many other Asian languages, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it has a strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. The sentence
Zo-wa hana-ga nagai literally means, "As for elephants, noses are long". The topic is
zo "elephant", and the subject is
hana "nose".
Japanese is a pro-drop language, meaning that the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. In addition, it is commonly felt that the shorter a Japanese sentence is, the better . As a result of this grammatical permissiveness and tendency towards brevity, Japanese speakers tend naturally to omit words from sentences, rather than refer to them with pronouns. In the context of the above example,
hana-ga nagai would mean "[their] noses are long," while
nagai by itself would mean "[they] are long." A single verb can be a complete sentence:
Yatta! "[I / we / they / etc] did [it]!". In addition, since adjectives can form the predicate in a Japanese sentence , a single adjective can be a complete sentence:
Urayamashii! "[I'm] jealous [of it]!".
While the language has some words that are translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some
Indo-European languages, and function differently. Instead, Japanese typically relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the "direction" of an action: "down" to the speaker or persons related to the speaker, or "up" to the listener or other person. For example,
setsumei shite moratta means "[he/she] explained it to [me/us]". Similarly,
oshiete ageta is commonly used to mean "[I/we] told [him/her]". Such "directional" auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action.
Japanese "pronouns" also function differently from Indo-European pronouns in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. For instance, one cannot say in English:
- *The big he ran down the street.
But one
can grammatically say essentially the same thing in Japanese:
- Okii kare-wa michi-o hashitte itta.
This is partly due to the fact that these words evolved from regular nouns, such as
kimi "you" ,
anata "you" , and
boku "I" . This is why some linguists do not classify Japanese "pronouns" as pronouns, but rather as referential nouns. Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situations requiring special emphasis as to who is doing what to whom.
The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as
watashi or
watakushi, while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word
ore or
boku. Similarly, different words such as
anata,
kimi, and
omae may be used to refer to a listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener.
Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English. For example, when speaking to one's teacher, it is appropriate to use
sensei , but inappropriate to use
anata. This is because
anata is used to refer to people of equal or lower status, and one's teacher has higher status.
It is very common for English speakers to include
watashi-wa or
anata-wa at the beginning of every Japanese sentence. Though these sentences are grammatically correct, they sound terribly strange even in very formal situations. It is roughly the equivalent of using a noun over and over in English, when a pronoun would suffice "John is coming over, so make sure you fix John a sandwich, because John loves sandwiches. I hope John likes the dress I'm wearing..."
Inflection and conjugation
Japanese has no grammatical number or gender. The noun
hon may refer to a single book or several books;
hito can mean "person" or "people"; and
ki can be "tree" or "trees". Where number is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity or by adding a suffix. Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus
Tanaka-san usually means
Mr./Ms. Tanaka. Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate a group of individuals through the addition of a collective suffix , such as
-tachi, but this is not a true plural: the meaning is closer to the English phrase "and company". A group described as
Tanaka-san-tachi may include people not named Tanaka. Some Japanese nouns are effectively plural, such as
hitobito "people" and
wareware "we/us", but these are sporadic and irregular.
Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present, or non-past, which is used for the present and the future. For verbs that represent an ongoing process, the
-te iru form indicates a continuous tense. For others that represent a change of state, the
-te iru form indicates a perfect tense. For example,
kite iru means "He has come ", but
tabete iru means "He is eating".
Questions have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle
-ka is added. For example,
Ii desu "It is OK" becomes
Ii desu-ka "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle
-no is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker:
Doshite konai-no? "Why aren't coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention:
Kore-wa? " this?";
Namae-wa? " name?".
Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb. For example,
Pan-o taberu "I will eat bread" or "I eat bread" becomes
Pan-o tabenai "I will not eat bread" or "I do not eat bread".
The so-called
-te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect ; combining verbs in a temporal sequence , simple commands, conditional statements and permissions , etc.
The word
da ,
desu is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English
be, but often takes on other roles. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence or, in some contexts, property:
aru and
iru , for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example,
Neko ga iru "There's a cat",
Ii kangae-ga nai "[I] haven't got a good idea".
The verb "to do" is often used to make verbs from nouns and has been productive in creating modern slang words . Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs to express concepts that are described in English using a verb and a preposition .
There are three types of adjective :
- keiyoshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i which can become past , or negative . Note that nai is also an i adjective, which can become past .
- atsui hi "a hot day".
- keiyodoshi, or na adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula, usually na. For example hen
- hen na hito "a strange person".
- rentaishi, also called true adjectives, such as onaji "the same"
- onaji hi "the same day".
Both
keiyoshi and
keiyodoshi may predicate sentences. For example,
- Gohan-ga atsui. "The rice is hot."
- Kare-wa hen da. "He's strange."
Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs.
The
rentaishi in Modern Japanese are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to directly modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include
ookina "big" and
onaji "the same" .
Both
keiyodoshi and
keiyoshi form adverbs, by following with
ni in the case of
keiyodoshi:
- hen ni naru "become strange",
and by changing
i to
ku in the case of
keiyoshi:
- atsuku naru "become hot".
The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include for example:
- no for possession, or nominalizing phrases.
- Watashi no kamera "My camera" / Sukii-ni iku no ga suki desu " like going skiing."
- Kare ga yatta. "He did it."
- Nani o tabemasu ka? "What will eat?"
- Tanaka-san ni kiite kudasai "Please ask Mr./Ms. Tanaka".
- Watashi wa tai ryori-ga ii desu. "As for me, Thai food is good."
Politeness
Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.
Broadly speaking, there are three main politeness levels in spoken Japanese: the
plain form , the
simple polite form and the
advanced polite form .
Since most relationships are not equal in Japanese
society, one person typically has a higher position. This position is determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state . The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner.
See uchi-sotoThe
plain form in Japanese is recognized by the shorter, dictionary form of verbs, and the
da form of the copula. At the
teinei level, verbs end with the helping verb
-masu, and the copula
desu is used. The advanced polite form,
keigo, actually consists of two kinds of politeness:
honorific language and
humble language. Whereas
teineigo is an inflectional system,
keigo often employs many special honorific and humble verb forms:
iku "to go" becomes
ikimasu in polite form, but is replaced by
mairimasu in humble form and
irasshaimasu in honorific form.
The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and his/her group. For example, the
-san suffix is an example of honorific language. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's "group". When speaking directly to one's superior in one's company or when speaking with other employees within one's company about a superior, a Japanese person will use vocabulary and inflections of the honorific register to refer to the in-group superior and his or her speech and actions. When speaking to a person from another company , however, a Japanese person will use the plain or the humble register to refer to the speech and actions of his or her own in-group superiors. In short, the register used in Japanese 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. For this reason, the Japanese system for explicit indication of social register is known as a system of "relative honorifics." This stands in stark contrast to the
Korean system of "absolute honorifics," in which the same register is used to refer to a particular individual in any context regardless of the relationship between the speaker and interlocutor. Thus, polite Korean speech can sound very presumptuous when translated verbatim into Japanese, as in Korean it is acceptable and normal to say things like "Our
Mr. Company-President..." when communicating with a member of an out-group, which would be very inappropriate in a Japanese social context.
Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of
o- or
go-; as a prefix.
o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas
go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as
gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word
tomodachi 'friend,' would become
o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status . On the other hand, a polite female speaker may sometimes refer to
mizu 'water' as
o-mizu merely to show politeness; this contrasts with the more abrupt speech of rude men .
See Gender differences in spoken Japanese.
Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity. That is, they use polite forms for new acquaintances, but if a relationship becomes more intimate, they no longer use them. This occurs regardless of age, social class, or gender.
Many researchers report that since the
1990s, the use of polite forms has become rarer. Needless to say, many older people disapprove of this trend. Young people usually receive extensive training in the "proper" use of polite language when they start to work for a company.
Vocabulary
The 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 kotobaLike Latin-derived words in English,
kango words typically are perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.
A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from
Korean and Ainu. Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, particularly ones of European extraction, which are called
gairaigo. This began with borrowings from Portuguese in the
16th century, followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's
long isolation of the
Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the
19th century, borrowing occurred from
German,
French and
English. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.
In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into
Chinese,
Korean, and
Vietnamese via their
kanji characters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, ??
seiji , and ??
kagaku are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greek- and Latin-derived words are shared among modern European languages, although many academic words formed from such roots were certainly coined by native speakers of other languages, such as English.
In the past few decades,
wasei-eigo has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as
wanpataan and
sukinshippu , although coined by compounding English roots, are nonsensical in a non-Japanese context. A small number of such words have been borrowed back into English.
Additionally, many native Japanese words have become commonplace in English, due to the popularity of many Japanese cultural exports. Words such as
sushi,
judo,
karate,
sumo,
karaoke,
origami,
tsunami,
samurai,
haiku,
ninja, sayonara,
rickshaw ,
futon, and many others have become part of the English language. See list of English words of Japanese origin for more.
Writing system
Before the
5th century, the Japanese had no
writing system of their own. They began to adopt the
Chinese writing script along with many other aspects of
Chinese culture after their introduction by
Korean monks and scholars during the 5th and 6th centuries AD.
At first, the Japanese wrote in
Classical Chinese, with Japanese names represented by characters used for their sounds and not their meanings. Later, this latter principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose; however, some Japanese words were written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as
man'yogana, a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech syllable by syllable.
Over time, a writing system evolved.
Chinese characters were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements, were simplified, and eventually became two syllabic scripts:
hiragana and
katakana.
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems:
kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries:
hiragana and
katakana. The
Latin alphabet is also sometimes used. Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji characters when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as ??
toitsu "unification."
Hiragana are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji, and also following kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs in Japanese are conjugated, kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing its meaning. For this reason, hiragana are suffixed to the ends of kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. Hiragana used in this way are called okurigana. Hiragana are also written in a superscript called
furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading. This is done to facilitate learning, as well as to clarify particularly old or obscure readings.
Katakana, like hiragana, are a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. For example "Australia" has been adapted as
Osutoraria, and "supermarket" has been adapted and shortened into
supa.
Romaji, literally "Roman letters," is the Japanese term for the
Latin alphabet.
Romaji are used for some loan words like "CD", "DVD", etc., and also for some Japanese creations like "Sony."
Japanese students begin to learn kanji characters from their first year at elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of kyoiku kanji, specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 939 characters in junior high school, covering in total 1,945
joyo kanji characters, which is generally considered sufficient for everyday life, although many kanji used in everyday life are not included in the list. An appendix of 290 additional characters for names was decreed in 1951. Various semi-official bodies were set up to monitor and enforce restrictions on the use of kanji in the press, publishing, in television broadcasts, etc. Thereafter, the official list of kyoiku kanji was repeatedly revised, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters remained largely unchanged.
A different list of officially approved kanji is used for purposes of registering personal names. Names containing unapproved characters are denied registration. However, as with the list of kyoiku kanji, criteria for inclusion were often arbitrary and led to many common and popular characters being disapproved for use. Under popular pressure and following a court decision holding the exclusion of common characters unlawful, the list of "approved" characters was substantially extended. Furthermore, families whose names are not on these lists were permitted to continue using the older forms.
Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War. During the period of post-war occupation , various schemes including the complete abolition of kanji and exclusive use of romaji were considered. The kyoiku kanji scheme arose as a compromise solution.
Learning Japanese
Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language. International interest in the Japanese language dates to the 1800s but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s and beyond. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003: 900,000 South Koreans, 389,000
Chinese, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans study Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. Furthermore, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including
Japanese Brazilians and foreigners married to Japanese nationals.
The Japanese government provides standard tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test . The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the
Business Japanese Proficiency Test, to test ability to understand Japanese in a business setting.
Bibliography
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- Chafe, William L. . Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. Li , Subject and topic . New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1244-7350-4.
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- Martin, Samuel E. . A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-3000-1813-4.
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- Miller, Roy. . The Japanese language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Miller, Roy. . Origins of the Japanese language: Lectures in Japan during the academic year, 1977-78. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-2959-5766-2.
- Mizutani, Osamu; & Mizutani, Nobuko. . How to be polite in Japanese: ?????? [Nihongo no keigo]. Tokyo: Japan Times. ISBN 4-7890-0338-8; ISBN 4-7890-0338-9.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. . Japanese. In B. Comrie , The major languages of east and south-east Asia. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-4150-4739-0.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. . The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-5213-6070-6 ; ISBN 0-5213-6918-5 .
- Shibamoto, Janet S. . Japanese women's language. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1264-0030-X. Graduate Level
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. . An introduction to Japanese linguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-9855-5 ; ISBN 0-6311-9856-3 . Upper Level Textbooks
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. . The handbook of Japanese linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6312-0504-7. Readings/Anthologies
See also
- Romanization of Japanese
- Common phrases in Japanese
- Henohenomoheji
- Japanese culture
- Japanese language and computers
- Japanese literature
- Japanese name
- The lists of and at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
- Swadesh list of Japanese words
- Japanese dictionaries
- Sino-Japanese
- Yojijukugo
External links
