Language Centre Resources - Japanese

Japanese

Japanese is spoken by c. 120 million people in Japan and some 2 million people outside Japan, mainly in Brazil, the USA and many other countries. There is no clear relationship to other languages (though some linguists consider it to be related to Korean, some think it belongs to the Altaic family). The southern dialects (e.g. in the Ryukyu Islands) have marked differences from the standard Japanese based on the dialect of Tokyo.

SCRIPT = kanji / hiragana / katakana / romaji (Roman script)