The so-called -te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ( Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ( Dekakete-mo ii? "May I go out?"), etc. Hiragana and katakana were first simplified from kanji, and hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century, [51] was mainly used by women. Hiragana was seen as an informal language, whereas katakana and kanji were considered more formal and was typically used by men and in official settings. However, because of hiragana's accessibility, more and more people began using it. Eventually, by the 10th century, hiragana was used by everyone. [52]

While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some Indo-European languages, and function differently. In some cases, Japanese relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group, and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. Here, the in-group includes the speaker and the out-group does not, and their boundary depends on context. For example, oshiete moratta ( 教えてもらった) (literally, "explaining got" with a benefit from the out-group to the in-group) means "[he/she/they] explained [it] to [me/us]". Similarly, oshiete ageta ( 教えてあげた) (literally, "explaining gave" with a benefit from the in-group to the out-group) means "[I/we] explained [it] to [him/her/them]". Such beneficiary auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action. keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i ( い) (such as 暑い atsui "to be hot") which can become past ( 暑かった atsukatta "it was hot"), or negative ( 暑くない atsuku nai "it is not hot"). nai is also an i adjective, which can become past ( 暑くなかった atsuku nakatta "it was not hot"). A study of macaque monkeys suggests that languages may have evolved to replace grooming as a better way of forging social ties amongst our ancestors American FactFinder". Factfinder.census.gov. Archived from the original on 2020-02-12 . Retrieved 2013-02-01.There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. This reflects the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. [41]

Around 125.4 million people speak Japanese. It’s the most space-concentrated of all the most-spoken languages, with a vast majority of its speakers living exclusively on the island of Japan. Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o- or go- as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a polite speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu to show politeness. Depending on who you ask, the Japanese language has either 40,000 or 50,000 kanji characters. 10,000 is a significant difference when you consider how difficult it is to master the recommended 2,000+ characters! Rendaku is a phenomenon unique to Japanese where, in a compound word consisting of at least two kanji, the first consonant in the second kanji changes its sound or becomes voiced. There are also a great number of words of mimetic origin in Japanese, with Japanese having a rich collection of sound symbolism, both onomatopoeia for physical sounds, and more abstract words. A small number of words have come into Japanese from the Ainu language. Tonakai ( reindeer), rakko ( sea otter) and shishamo ( smelt, a type of fish) are well-known examples of words of Ainu origin.There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favor of a national language. [3] Ethnologue (2023) [ edit ] There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island, whose dialects are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers.