Distribution

JAPAN, Korea, Hawaii.

Introduction

Japanese is probably related to Korean, and possibly to Manchurian, Mongolian and Turkish too. It is not related to Chinese. In modern Japan everybody understands and can speak an approximation to the standard language, though wide dialectal variety exists.

Japanese and English speakers find each other's languages hard to learn. One reason for this is that the broad constituents of sentence structure are ordered very differently in the two languages. The following fragment from a Japanese magazine, translated word for word into English, illustrates the learner's problem:

or, less exotically:

In addition to the difficulties posed by great grammatical, lexical and phonetic disparity, Japanese speakers' attitudes to language in general are heavily coloured by aspects of their own language. Firstly, ‘respect language’ is so finely graded that an out-of-context fragment of dialogue can tell the eavesdropper a great deal about the age, sex, relationship and relative status of both speakers: even a transcript bereft of such vocal clues as voice quality and articulation reveals a sensitive choice of vocabulary and grammar in this respect.