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 later, but it can be noted here that although characters were adopted principally for their meaning, and pronounced as the equivalent-meaning Japanese spoken word, they also had Chinese pronunciations of their own, which also entered the Japanese language (with considerable modification in some cases). Other characters were borrowed specifically for their pronunciation in order to express Japanese words or word-elements in writing. Also, many Chinese words (especially compounds) were adopted. And so, especially from around the seventh and eight centuries, Japanese became considerably "Sinified."
Presently, kana phonetic symbols were produced from certain characters used primarily for their sound rather than meaning, and were initially applied (in the case of katakana) as pronunciation guides to characters. Eventually kana were also used for writing native Japanese words, especially the more cursive hiragana, which were used largely by women. Among other things this meant that Japanese people could now write in a way that Chinese people could not readily understand (that is, not without study).
Westerners first arrived in Japan in 1543, and stayed for around a century before being expelled. They were mostly Portuguese, and later Dutch (who alone among Westerners avoided total expulsion and were allowed a small settlement), and these two nations left a legacy of a number of words that were incorporated into Japanese. However, it was when the Westerners returned in 1853, this time for good, that Japanese underwent its next major change. This time it was English that was the major influence. In fact, as Japan set out on its course of modernization—which to a large extent meant Westernization—there was even a move among certain people in high places to adopt English as the official language. This move, in similar fashion to the eighteenth century proposal to make German the official language of the United States, was taken seriously and only narrowly failed to gain acceptance. Had it not failed, you would now be studying Japanese as an archaic language, not as a living one!
FIGURE 1f: What might have been.
During the decades following the return of the Westerners, in addition to numerous new words adopted from English and other Western languages there were many new Sino-Japanese words coined, such as for "telegraph" and presently "automobile." A similar process occurred in China at around the same time, and there was borrowing both ways between China and Japan so it is not always clear in which country particular words were coined. There was also a brief revival of very heavily Sinified language among scholars, and a reasonably successful attempt by novelists to bridge what was up until then a substantial gap between spoken and written language styles. In recognition of the complexity of the writing system, there was also a proposal to abandon kanji and use only kana, but, like the move to adopt English, this ended up failing to gain acceptance.
During the strong nationalistic atmosphere leading up to World War Two, there was a move to ban Western words and replace them with Japanese (or Sino-Japanese) words. This had limited success in practice, and, following Japan's defeat and the largely American occupation that ensued, the profile of English in Japan and in the Japanese language greatly increased. As we shall see later, the Japanese are now actually making up their own "English" terms and phrases, known as "Japlish," and in some cases re-exporting them to the English-speaking world!
As internationalization and globalization progress, changes to languages worldwide are inevitable. Given the Japanese ability to adapt and modify, we can expect that the language will evolve into an even more hybrid form, despite the significant degree of ritual language use mentioned earlier.
1.3.4 What is "standard" Japanese?
The standard language that now represents (British) English is often