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Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan and parts of China, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese and in Korea people were given a Japanese name. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in the United States (notably California and Hawaii), and Brazil also frequently speak Japanese. There is also a small community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.
Japanese is the only official language of Japan, and Japan is the only country to have Japanese as an official language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyojungo 標準語 or standard Japanese, and kyotsugo 共通語 or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japan 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.
Because it is Japan's only official language and there are few foreign Japanese speakers, the language is heavily tied to Japanese culture and vice-versa. There are many Japanese words describing certain Japanese cultural ideas, traditions, and customs (e.g., wa, nemawashi, kaizen, seppuku), which do not have corresponding words in other languages. Understanding the Japanese language requires knowledge of Japanese society.
There are dozens of dialects spoken in Japan. Among them are Kansai-ben, Tohoku-ben , and Kanto-ben (Tokyo and surrounding areas). Dialects are generally mutually intelligible, although extremely geographically separated dialects such as the Tohoku and Kyushu variants are not. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage, vocabulary and in some cases pronunciation.
The Ryukyuan languages used in and around Okinawa are related to Japanese, but the two are mutually unintelligible. Due to the close relationship they are still sometimes considered only dialects of Japanese.
The Japanese sound system is relatively simple, compared to most languages. Syllables generally consist of at most one consonant and one vowel. There are 5 vowel and 17 consonant phonemes (compared to 15 vowels and 22 consonants in English). Japanese syllables consist of:
The vowels of Japanese are:
Japanese vowels are pure sounds like their Italian or Spanish counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel, which is indicated as /u/ in the diagram. This vowel is often described as unrounded, but is actually pronounced with "compressed lips", which is a different articulatory gesture from either rounded or unrounded lips: it is unrounded, but without spreading. The "u=" to the right of the diagram are possible narrow transcriptions using IPA, as suggested by the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.
In some English dialects, Japanese vowels can be approximated as follows:
Vowels have a length distinction (short vs. long). Cf contrasting pairs of words like ojisan ("uncle") vs. ojiisan ("grandfather"), or tsuki ("moon") vs. tsuuki ("airflow").
Although Japanese has formally no diphthongs because phonologically two different vowels in a row are not considered a diphthong, there are diphthong-like monomoraic glide-vowel or bimoraic vowel-vowel sequences. When phonetically considered, sequences like hyo, pyu, hai among others are diphthongs.
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