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CHAPTER ONE

Getting Acquainted with the Language

In this first chapter we profile the Japanese language to give you a basic "feel" for it. We show you how it compares with other languages, particularly English, and cover basic background such as its history and usage.

1.1 In a nutshell, what English speakers can expect

We will look later in detail at the various components of the Japanese language. But let us start off by considering in brief, and in comparative terms, some of the main features of the language as they generally strike a native English speaker. We will focus on four key areas—words, writing, grammar and usage.

1.1.1 Vocabulary

A reasonably well-educated native speaker of English will be familiar with around 25,000 words, and be able to use about two-thirds of those actively—though in typical everyday speech only around 3,000 are used.

Figures are roughly comparable for native speakers of Japanese, though they are higher by perhaps 15% or so. In general, Japanese also make a greater distinction between words actively used and those considered "bookish."

English is one of the world's richest languages, thanks to its diverse sources. The two principal sources are Romance (derived from Latin, often through French), and Germanic (including Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian). In addition we have many words from ancient Greek and numerous other sources as varied as Czech ("robot") and Arabic ("algebra"), as well as those considered ancient native such as Celtic ("crag"). In conversation around three-quarters of the words we use are Anglo-Saxon.

Japanese also has diverse sources. In addition to a good stock of native words, comprising almost half of all its modern vocabulary, it has a similar proportion of its words coming from Chinese, and in modern times almost ten percent of its words derive from English. Chinese plays a similar role in Japanese as Romance words in English, and in particular often has associations with classicism and learning similar to Latin and Greek. As in English, Japanese also contains a number of modified words from a variety of other languages, such as Portuguese (pan for "bread," from pão), and German (arubaito for "part-time job," from Arbeit).

FIGURE 1a: Japanese vocabulary composition

1.1.2 Writing system

The English script uses the Roman alphabet of 26 symbols, effectively doubled to allow for both upper and lower case. These are used phonetically, that is to say for their sound rather than any pictorial meaning. This seems very simple. There is however a huge range in the variety of pronunciations possible for these symbols, especially in combination— e.g. at least eight different ways of pronouncing "-ough" (in British English), such as in "thorough," "through," "though," "thought," "cough," "enough," "hiccough," and "bough." English spelling is among the most difficult in the world, and can be very daunting to a learner.

FIGURE 1b: Can you read this?

George Bernard Shaw is credited with illustrating the difficulty of English spelling by coming up with this spelling of a common word. What word do you think it is?

Clue: "gh" as in "enough," "o" as in "women," "ti" as in "station."

Second clue: yes, it swims in the sea!

Japanese, by contrast, can involve four different scripts. It can occasionally be written in the Roman alphabet (known as romaji), such as in textbooks or other material for foreigners or in certain advertising, but generally uses two phonetic scripts based on syllables (hiragana and katakana, collectively known as kana) in combination with characters derived from Chinese (known as kanji). Whereas phonetic scripts are based on sound, characters are based primarily on pictures or ideas, though confusingly they can in many cases also have phonetic elements and multiple pronunciations. It is this relatively complex and unfamiliar writing system, not the spoken language, that provides the major challenge for Westerners in learning Japanese to any truly advanced level.

1.1.3 Grammar

There are a number of significant differences between English and Japanese grammar—that is, the rules of language.

Whereas English is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language ("the dog bit the boy"), Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) ("dog boy bit"). In terms of the world's languages, there are approximately equal numbers in both categories, so it cannot be said that Japanese is unusual in this regard.

English usually relies on word-order or sometimes change of word-form to distinguish subject and object (e.g. "he" is the subject, "him" is the object), but Japanese primarily uses particles to do this. A particle is a short word (such as wa, ga or o) that is not always translatable in itself but is used as a sort of suffix to indicate the grammatical role of the word it follows. Among other things particles can convey similar meaning to that produced in English by articles such as "the" or "a," which do not exist as such in Japanese. English has articles, Japanese has particles.

Other differences the English speaker will encounter include greater conceptual and grammatical overlap between verbs and adjectives, the frequent omission of pronouns, the frequent omission of indication of plurality or singularity, the absence of verb conjugation according to person (restricted in English relative to, say, French, but still found in "I see, she sees" and the verb "to be"), the absence of a dedicated future-only tense, the structure of subordinate clauses, and a greater sensitivity to politeness. Many of these differences boil down to Japanese generally being less explicit and specific than English.

TABLE 1a: Key grammatical differences between Japanese and English

ENGLISH	JAPANESE
subject-verb-object	subject-object-verb
articles (a, the)	particles (ga, wa)
some verb change according to person/number	no verb change according to person/number
dedicated future tense	no dedicated future tense
pronouns almost always used	pronouns often omitted
relative clauses follow item	relative clauses precede item
pronouns show subj./obj. (he/him)	pronouns unchanged
not especially politeness-sensitive	very politeness-sensitive
frequent explicitness	frequent implicitness

1.1.4 Socio-cultural context

To a considerable extent languages reflect the cultures in which they are embedded, and in turn the particular worldview and ordering of life characteristic of that culture. In other words, as many theorists argue, your language helps shape the way you interpret the world. If there is a significant dislocation between your first language and the surrounding culture in which you find yourself, feelings of alienation can arise, as can happen with immigrants or travelers. And because both culture and language are dynamic, this feeling of alienation can even occur in your native country—the generation gap is such an example.

Since Japanese culture is markedly different in many regards from English (or Anglo) culture, this will be reflected in language usage. What is "right" is often a matter of convention, or what anthropologists call ritual. All languages have ritualized elements, which have a socio-cultural meaning beyond or different from their literal meaning. For example, are you really enquiring about a person's state of health when you greet them with "How are you?" Similarly, when Japanese meet early in the morning (before around 10 a.m.) they will say Ohayō gozaimasu meaning literally "It's early." (We will discuss the letter ō in Part Two.) They do not expect a reply such as "Thank you for letting me know. I hadn't realized." Such a reply would almost certainly be deemed grossly sarcastic.

In terms of degree the Japanese language is considerably ritualized. In a given situation, the balance between the obligation to use conventionalized language, and the freedom to do or say "your own thing," is more likely to incline to the former than an English speaker might expect.

The English speaker will also note in particular that despite substantial recent socio-cultural changes Japanese is still a significantly rank-oriented and gender-differentiated language. References to the self often differ from the English. So do insults and metaphors. For example, insults and oaths involving references to private parts of the body or religious icons and so forth do not necessarily carry any weight in Japanese, where good old-fashioned idiocy is the main theme of insults.

Basically, word associations, language usages and conventions that may be broadly shared within the Anglophone world, and indeed more broadly much of the West, are not necessarily the same in Japan.

1.2 Who speaks Japanese?

We look here at the native speakers of Japanese, and those who learn it as a second or other language.

1.2.1 Native speakers

Japanese is obviously spoken by native Japanese in Japan, who comprise some 98% of the 127 million Japanese-speaking population. In addition, it is spoken (or maintained) as a "heritage language" by more than a million people from Japanese emigrant families, notably in areas with a significant ethnic Japanese population such as Hawaii, parts of California and, to a lesser extent, certain parts of South America. Many children of Korean and Chinese immigrants in Japan also speak Japanese as their first language even though they may not be Japanese citizens.

In total, roughly 125-130 million people speak Japanese as a mother tongue or close to it. This contrasts with the approximately 835 million native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (the language with the most native speakers), and 325 million or so native speakers of variants of English (the most widely spoken language).

Though it is not designated as one of the United Nations' six official languages (in alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), it ranks ninth in the world in terms of the number of native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English, Bengali, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese).

Japanese is also becoming increasingly prominent as an internet language.

FIGURE 1c: "Top Ten" language (in millions of speakers)

1.2.2 Non-native speakers and students

Those who study Japanese as a Second or Other Language are sometimes referred to as JSOL speakers.

Partly due to Japan's prominence as an economic superpower Japanese is now studied widely around the world—though admittedly not to the same degree as English, which has become a truly international language with more than a billion non-native students. At any given time there are about 2 million people studying Japanese, with a general rate of increase of around 5% per year. As many as 100,000 students, mainly from Asia, go to Japan each year for language study in one form or another. And in countries with significant geo-political as well as economic links with Japan, Japanese is studied extensively, both privately and at educational institutions. South Korea tops the list of (current) formal students of Japanese as a percentage of overall population, with just over 2%, followed by Australia and New Zealand, Doth around 1.5% (as opposed to the USA's 0.04% and Britain's 0.02%). In recent years Japanese has displaced French in Australia and New Zealand as the most popular foreign language chosen by school students.

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 referred. to—somewhat inaccurately—as the "Queen's English." However, the Japanese monarch's title has never been seen as a representation of standard Japanese, for the language of the Imperial Household, though now less distinct than in the past—very few members of the public could understand Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech when the first imperial radio broadcast was made in August 1945—is still not very representative of ordinary Japanese. Rather, standard Japanese might be termed, like "BBC English," to be "NHK Japanese," based on the language of the nation's principal broadcaster Nihon Hōsō Kyoku (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). This in turn is based largely on the dialect of the capital, Tokyo.

There are many rich and varied dialects in Japan, more so than in England, but in this book we focus on standard "NHK Japanese."