In a given situation, the balance between the obligation to use conventionalized language, and the freedom to do or say "your own thing," is more likely to incline to the former than an English speaker might expect.
The English speaker will also note in particular that despite substantial recent socio-cultural changes Japanese is still a significantly rank-oriented and gender-differentiated language. References to the self often differ from the English. So do insults and metaphors. For example, insults and oaths involving references to private parts of the body or religious icons and so forth do not necessarily carry any weight in Japanese, where good old-fashioned idiocy is the main theme of insults.
Basically, word associations, language usages and conventions that may be broadly shared within the Anglophone world, and indeed more broadly much of the West, are not necessarily the same in Japan.
1.2 Who speaks Japanese?
We look here at the native speakers of Japanese, and those who learn it as a second or other language.
1.2.1 Native speakers
Japanese is obviously spoken by native Japanese in Japan, who comprise some 98% of the 127 million Japanese-speaking population. In addition, it is spoken (or maintained) as a "heritage language" by more than a million people from Japanese emigrant families, notably in areas with a significant ethnic Japanese population such as Hawaii, parts of California and, to a lesser extent, certain parts of South America. Many children of Korean and Chinese immigrants in Japan also speak Japanese as their first language even though they may not be Japanese citizens.
In total, roughly 125-130 million people speak Japanese as a mother tongue or close to it. This contrasts with the approximately 835 million native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (the language with the most native speakers), and 325 million or so native speakers of variants of English (the most widely spoken language).
Though it is not designated as one of the United Nations' six official languages (in alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), it ranks ninth in the world in terms of the number of native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English, Bengali, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese).
Japanese is also becoming increasingly prominent as an internet language.
FIGURE 1c: "Top Ten" language (in millions of speakers)
1.2.2 Non-native speakers and students
Those who study Japanese as a Second or Other Language are sometimes referred to as JSOL speakers.
Partly due to Japan's prominence as an economic superpower Japanese is now studied widely around the world—though admittedly not to the same degree as English, which has become a truly international language with more than a billion non-native students. At any given time there are about 2 million people studying Japanese, with a general rate of increase of around 5% per year. As many as 100,000 students, mainly from Asia, go to Japan each year for language study in one form or another. And in countries with significant geo-political as well as economic links with Japan, Japanese is studied extensively, both privately and at educational institutions. South Korea tops the list of (current) formal students of Japanese as a percentage of overall population, with just over 2%, followed by Australia and New Zealand, Doth around 1.5% (as opposed to the USA's 0.04% and Britain's 0.02%). In recent years Japanese has displaced French in Australia and New Zealand as the most popular foreign language chosen by school students.
FIGURE 1d: Select population percentages studying Japanese
Japanese was spoken as a second—or even technically as a "first"—language by Koreans and some Chinese who experienced Japanese occupation prior to 1945, and for whom use of the Japanese language was compulsory. However, it is not actively used by those people today in those countries.
1.3 Where did the Japanese language come from?
We consider here how the Japanese language came to be what it is now. Along the way we consider questions such as "Is it unique?", "Who first spoke it?", "Has it changed much over time?", and "Is it standardized?"
1.3.1 Where does it belong?
Japanese has defied attempts by scholars of linguistics to place it with any certainty in any one language family. That is, unlike the vast majority of the world's languages, it belongs in a category of its own. This contrasts with English, which, like most European (and Indian) languages, derives from an ancient Indo-European core language. To be precise, English quite demonstrably belongs to the Anglo-Frisian branch of the West Germanic group within the Indo-European family.
The closest language neighbor of Japanese is Korean, which has considerable grammatical similarities. Korean is loosely placed in the Altaic family (along with Turkish and Mongolian), but this is questionable, and any placement of Japanese in the Altaic family even more so. Japanese also shows some evidence, especially in sound structure, of lesser links with the Austronesian language family of the Southwest Pacific, such as the Maori language in New Zealand.
FIGURE 1e: Simplified language families
1.3.2 What are its origins?
The origins of the Japanese language, like the origins of the Japanese people, are not entirely clear. Until around 2,500 years ago the Japanese islands were principally inhabited by groups of basically related peoples now referred to collectively as the Jomon. Over the next thousand years waves of immigrants arrived, largely through the Korean Peninsula, and displaced (in some cases intermixing with) the Jomon. These newcomers—who were basically related among themselves, but significantly differed from the Jomon—were later called Yayoi people, or more generally Yamato people. They constitute more than 99% of present-day native Japanese. Physical links with the Jomon are found in the indigenous Ainu of Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, of whom about 20,000 survive. So the Ainu language might in a historical sense be considered the first identifiable language of Japan, or at least a direct descendant of it (just as the Celtic language Erse, now spoken only in a few parts of Scotland, might be considered the first identifiable language of Britain). However, it is even more difficult to associate Ainu with any language family than Japanese as we know it today, which is the Japanese of the immigrant Yamato people.
Certainly, however, the obscure and now almost extinct oral tongue of the Ainu (Jomon?) will have had some impact on the early development of Japanese, for the Yamato newcomers absorbed at least some of its vocabulary. The name of Japan's famous volcano Mount Fuji, for example, is believed to be derived from an Ainu word fuchi, meaning "Fire God." And in fact the Japanese word kami, meaning "a (Shinto) god," almost certainly comes from the Ainu kamui, meaning "a god" (and not vice versa, as some Japanese linguists claim).
1.3.3 How has it developed over time?
Like English, the Japanese language—that is, the language of the Yamato people—has changed markedly over the centuries. Old Japanese had more sounds (e.g. eight vowels as opposed to the present five), and was much more inflected (having numerous changes to word-endings), in particular producing complicated combinations of verb tenses.
It existed as a purely spoken language till around the fifth century, when Chinese script, which was developed for a very different type of language, was borrowed as a supposedly "ready-made" means of writing Japanese. The consequences of this questionable move will be discussed in more detail
