Japanese Language Jobs

 

Spoken by: over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities.
Spoken in: Japanese is the official language of Japan and of no other country. Because it is Japan’s only official language and there are few foreign Japanese speakers, the language is heavily tied to Japanese culture and vice-versa. There are many Japanese words describing certain Japanese cultural ideas, traditions, and customs (e.g., Wa, Nemawashi, Kaizen, Kamikaze), which do not have corresponding words in other languages. Understanding the Japanese language requires knowledge of Japanese society.
Interesting facts: Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality; geisha means “person of the arts” and the first geisha were actually men.

Japanese is different from English and most other European languages in terms of its writing system, grammatical structure and usage and role in society. Though the Japanese language is of uncertain origin, there are many theories:

• Japanese is a relative of the Ural-Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Korean, Mongolian, and more distantly, Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Finnish. Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that like Finnish, Estonian, Turkish, and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language, with two (phonologically distinctive) tones, similar to Serbian/Croatian and Swedish. This tonal system is often referred to as a pitch accent in linguistics.
• Japanese is a relative of other Asian languages. This theory maintains that Japanese split from – or had large influences from – other East Asian languages such as Korean (but not Chinese). Phonological and lexical similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages have been noted.
• Japanese is related to southern Asian languages. Recent phonological research suggests a possible relationship between Japanese and Tamil, a member of the Dravidian language family spoken in southern India.
• Japanese is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.

There are dozens of dialects spoken in Japan. Among them are Kansai-ben, Okinawa-kotoba, Tugaru-ben, and Kanto-ben (Tokyo and surrounding areas). Dialects are generally mutually intelligible, although extremely geographically separated dialects such as the Touhoku and Kyuushuu variants are not. The Ryuukyuu dialects used in and around Okinawa are related to Japanese, but the two are mutually unintelligible. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage, vocabulary and in some cases pronunciation.
There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyoujungo or standard Japanese, and kyoutsuugo or the common language. As government policy has modernised Japan, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyoujungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications.

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