Japanese Holds A Place Amongst Most Important Languages Of The World

Japanese ranks as one of the world’s most important languages with over 126 million speakers. Of these, the vast majority, about 124 million, reside within Japan and the island group of Okinawa. Another two million or so live in the United States, Canada and Australia, areas where Japanese have immigrated or moved temporarily for business purposes. Millions of additional near-native or otherwise fluent speakers of Japanese reside within Korea, China, or other parts of Asia. Many of these people acquired Japanese during Japan’s military operations both before and after World War II. There has been a great surge of interest in the study of Japanese as a second language throughout the past 30 years, due to the Western world’s fascination with Japanese culture, as well as to Japan’s status as a world economic power.

The origin of Japanese is in considerable dispute among scholars. Evidence has been offered for a number of sources: Ural-Altaic, Polynesian, and Chinese among others. Of these, Japanese is most widely believed to be connected to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean within its domain. Among these languages, Korean is most frequently compared to Japanese, as both languages share significant key features such as general structure, vowel harmony, lack of conjunctions, and the extensive use of honorific speech, in which the hierarchical rank of the listener heavily affects the discourse. However, pronunciation of Japanese is significantly different from Korean, and the languages are mutually unintelligible. Japanese also shares considerable similarities with the languages of the Ryukyu Islands, within which Okinawa is located, although the Ryukyu languages and Japanese are also mutually unintelligible.

In the same way that the origin of the Japanese language is ambiguous, there is also considerable uncertainty relative to the precise origins of the Japanese people themselves. Significant influences from the horse cultures of Mongolia and Northern Asia, the rice cultures of Korea, China, and Southeast Asia, and Polynesia have all been identified. Consequently, it is difficult to establish a date for the origin of Japanese peoples, but a proto-Japanese must have existed from at least the 3rd century AD, when the various clan-tribes of Japan were consolidated to become a nation by the Yamato Clan, and possibly from a much earlier time, based on Chinese records which indicate the unification of Japan as a nation of tribal communities from several hundred years BC.

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