Official status
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: hyōjungo 標準語 or standard Japanese, and kyōtsūgo 共通語 or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japan many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyōjungo 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.
Dialects
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 Tōhoku and Kyūshū 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.
Sounds
The Japanese sound system is relatively simple, compared to most languages. For the most part, syllables 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:
- Optionally, an initial consonant, chosen from the 15 consonant phonemes not including ʔ and ɴ,
- A vowel, which may be short or long, and
- Optionally, either ɴ or ʔ, the glottal stop. (Note that the latter can only occur preceding subsequent syllables in the same word beginning with the k, s, t, and p phoneme. This is often referred to as a doubled consonant.)
Vowels
Japanese has no diphthongs, but there is a contrast between long and short vowels. The vowels of Japanese are:
Japanese vowels are pure sounds like their Italian 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:
- /a/ as in father
- /i/ as in meet
- /u/ as in flute
- /e/ as in etch
- /o/ as in hope
