There are some 130 million people who speak Japanese. Japanese is a part of the Japonic-Ryukyuan languages. It is spoken mostly in Japan. It is also spoken sometimes in Korea, parts of Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Philippines and some Pacific Islands which were under the occupation of the Japanese during and after the World War II. There are Japanese emigrants communities in Brazil, Argentina, Hawaii, Australia, Peru and the United States who also speak the language. But their descendants no longer speak the language fluently. Japan as well as the island nation of Palau has Japanese as their official language. Words from other languages have been borrowed and incorporated into the Japanese vocabulary. Prominent amongst them are the Chinese words. This has resulted from the interaction lasting 1,500 years. Indo-European languages too are its other source. Some Portuguese have been borrowed during the 16^th century and Dutch in the 17^th century and particularly English in the 19h century. Japanese script is a combination of three other types of scripts, namely Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji is the modified Chinese characters. Hiragana and Katakana are two syllabic scripts of the modified Chinese characters.

Hy?jungo is the standard form of the Japanese language which is taught in the schools and used officially though Ky?ts?go is the form that is the common language. K?go, the colloquial language is commonly used in writing though the traditional literary written language, Bungo, has become dormant. There are many dialects spoken in Japan. The predominant one is the Tokyo-type, followed by the Kyoto-Osaka-type and the Ky?sh?-type. The dialects of the peripheral regions such as T?hoku or Tsushima or southern Ky?sh? are often unintelligible to the mainstream Japanese. The Ry?ky?an languages, spoken in Okinawa and Amami Islands though distinct are treated as dialects of Japanese. The mass media, education and the mobility of people have made the standard Japanese prevalent nationwide.

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