Period+7+Japan+Language


 * By Jake Sabo, Jillian Eby and Mary Pruitt**

Japanese is a growing language ranked ninth in the world. There are over 130 million people who speak the language and that number is growing in the world as a second language. Many of the people who speak Japanese not only live in Japan, but many Inhabit Hawaii and Korea. China and Korea both were under the occupation of Japan earlier in the century; therefore Japanese is widely spoken. The writing system that developed is a combination of Chinese characters and other scripts. The many of the islands including the four main islands as well as the smaller islands have dialects. This may cause confusion and lead to a standard or common dialect. Japanese is not directly linked to one single family of languages. The closest link that can be made is to the Ataic family. That includes Turkish, Mongolian, and Korean. The language started in Turkey, and many migrators spread it from the West to Japan in the East. On the northern Island of Hok Kaido, the people are culturally different and speak another language. 1500 years ago, the “old Japan” era had features that have been lost over time. Old Japanese had eight vowels where as now that only have five. The transition from old took place from the 12th century to the 16th century. All languages have to use a specific order of words to make their sentences legible and sensible. In our own language, we put a noun, a verb, and then the object ends it. But in Japanese, it is slightly different. It starts the same, with a noun. But then it has the object switch places with the verb. Then the verb will finish the sentence. The most important thing about Japanese grammar is that the verb is last. You could use the subject, then the object, then the verb. Or you could begin with the object, move to the subject and finish with the verb, just as long as the verb ends your sentence. Another big part of the Japanese language is that they use a case-marking system. They could use one of these case-markings at the end of a name to change the order of a sentence but still let it retain its original meaning. The Japanese language has a lot of confusing parts. But if you work hard enough at trying to learn it, the switched order of their sentences and their difficult case-markings will become as easy as speaking English. media type="youtube" key="dNHitUDJ1zo" height="385" width="480" Miyagawa, Shigeru. "The Japanese Language." Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13 Oct. 1999. Web. 12 May 2010. .