Itsukushima Shrine (Itsukushima-jinja), Hatsukaichi, Japan
Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Nihongo (日本語)
Native speakers (estimated): 124 million
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 126 million
Kiyomizu-dera Temple, Kyoto and Mt. Fuji
Where it’s spoken: While it is spoken universally in Japan as the de facto national language, Japanese surprisingly has no official status there. In fact, Japanese is neither officially recognized, nor widely spoken, in any other country—with the tiny exception of Angaur, a 3-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean state of Palau, where it shares official status alongside Palauan and English. The language was spread in the 20th century by Japanese military occupation of other countries up to World War II, including Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, parts of China, and many Pacific island nations—including Palau.
The Japanese language has also been spread by emigration, with the largest numbers flowing to Brazil and the United States, which now each have around 1.5 million citizens of Japanese descent. Japanese-Americans are most concentrated in California and Hawaii, where more than 16% of the population has Japanese roots; other significant destinations for Japanese migration include Australia, the Philippines, Peru, and Argentina. However, most of these communities are long-established and have tended to adopt the local language (whether English, Portuguese or Spanish) as their primary means of communication. According to US census data, Japanese has slid from being the 10th most spoken (non-English) home language in 1980 to 13th in 2000, and 17th in 2019. In Canada and Australia it doesn’t even make the top 25.
In contrast, since the latter 20th century Japanese has become a popular choice for foreign language study based on the increasing influence of Japan in economics and culture. Though far behind Spanish, Japanese is the fifth most studied foreign language for American students in grades K-12 (after German and Latin) and the fourth most studied in higher education (after ASL, but ahead of German). In Australian schools, Japanese is the top foreign language despite its rarity in use at home. Japanese is also frequently studied as a second (or third) language in South Korea, China, Taiwan due to proximity and cultural and business ties; it doesn’t hurt that anime, manga, video games and Japanese food are all wildly popular.
Language family: Japonic
Related languages: As the name suggests, Japanese is the main language of the Japonic family, and encompasses multiple regional dialects. The only other subgroup are the Ryukyuan languages, spoken across the archipelago to the south of Japan’s main islands. The most prominent of these is Okinawan, with over 1 million speakers, though most speakers of Ryukyuan languages also speak Japanese. In the past, some linguists have proposed relationships with other language groups including Korean, Austronesian, and even Turkish, but none of these links have been widely accepted.
Fushimi Inari Shrine (Fushimi Inari-taisha), Kyoto, Japan
“America” – Print by Utagawa Yoshitora, 1860
Street sign, Ginza district, Tokyo
Ginza subway station, Tokyo
Other fun facts:
Japanese is one of only three languages in the world which are so dominant in a country that no one ever bothered to make them official there. The other two unofficially common languages are English (in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand) and Spanish (in Mexico and Argentina).