Introduction

Language is considered to be the means of communication between people, and therefore it potentially links those speaking the same language to one another. Any shared language may give rise to a sense of community amongst its speakers. Language has the capability to constitute a bond between its speakers and this has been very often purposefully employed when a new sense of community needed to be evoked. The Japanese nation too required the spread of the Japanese language. From “Karaoke” to “Karate”, from “Zen Buddhism” to “adzuki”, the Japanese language has been exporting oriental traditions to the Western culture for decades.

The origin and roots of the Japanese language

The history of the Japanese is somewhat a mystery, partly because its relationship with other languages is not very clear. There is a considerable dispute amongst the linguists regarding the origin of the Japanese language. The Japanese language is most widely believed to be connected to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean within its domain. Most frequently Korean is compared to the Japanese language, as both the languages share significant key features like general structure, vowel harmony, lack of conjunctions, and the extensive use of honorific speech. But, the pronunciation of Japanese is significantly different from Korean, and the languages are mutually unintelligible. The writing system of the Japanese language is extremely complicated, with two sets of phonetic syllabaries, with approximately 50 syllables in each and thousands of Chinese characters called “kanji”, approximately 2,000 of which the Ministry of Education has designated as required to learn before high school graduation. In the development of the language, the adaptation of the Chinese characters during the sixth to ninth century A.D played and vital role. By the twelfth century, the syllabic writing systems, “hiragana” and “katakana”, were created out of “kanji”, providing the Japanese new freedom in writing their native language. Presently, Japanese is written with a mixture of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. 

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the Japanese language has adopted a huge amount of foreign words mainly from English. There are also a few words adapted from  Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish. These words arrived in Japan mainly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the missionaries and merchants started to visit the country.

The Japanese language has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. 

Present scenario of the Japanese language, how and why did the Japanese language spread

Japanese is spoken by more than 130 million speakers, which makes it the ninth most widely spoken language in the world. Outside Japan, there are another 5 million people who speak Japanese with some degree of proficiency.

Currently, Japan is one of the world’s leading industrial powers and is remarkable for its economic growth since World War II. Japan is renowned for its people’s strong work ethic and a great level of cooperation between government and industry. The Japanese market is enticing to potential investors and organizations looking to extend their reach. Japan is considered to be a very poised, educated and tech-savvy country, coming out with new and innovative technologies every year. And this is a great reason why people all over the world are showing interest and learning the Japanese language. Learning Japanese or knowing the language gives you bigger business opportunities. And that is the reason people wanting to do business in Japan tends to learn the language. Even there is a great opportunity for translators, interpreters and tutors