codzienność: Japanese language

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo; [ɲihoŋɡo] ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic, and the now discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance. Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents fr…

Evidence: 54 • authority: 72

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asian mainland, it is bordered to the west by the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk in the north, and the East China Sea in the south. The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands alongside over 14,000 smaller islands. Japan is divided into 47 administrative prefectures and eight traditional regions, and around 75% of its terrain is mountainous and heavily forested, concentrating its agriculture and highly urbanized population along its eastern coastal plains. With a population of almost 123 million as of 2026, it is the world's 11th most populous country. Tokyo is the country's ca…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 88

Japanese in Japan. The Japanese language ranks ninth worldwide by number of L1 speakers and is used mainly by speakers within Japan. It is rich in regional and social variation. Standard Japanese (hyōjungo) was formed after the Meiji Restoration along with kokugo ‘national language’ and nihongo ‘Japanese language’. The alternative concept of a ‘common language’, kyōtsūgo was introduced after World War II for interdialectal communication. This variety is subject to considerable social differentiation. Gender differences in Japanese do not necessarily coincide with the traditionally accepted norm. There is wide variation among speakers within each gender group. A discrepancy between prescript…

Evidence: 43 • authority: 72

Punjabi (sometimes spelled Panjabi) is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Punjabi people native to the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. With over 156 million speakers across all its varieties, it is the seventh most spoken native language and the twelfth most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world. Punjabi is the third most spoken native language in South Asia (after Hindi and Bengali). It is the most widely-spoken native language in Pakistan, with 123.2 million speakers across all its language varieties, according to the 2023 census, and the 11th most widely-spoken in Indi…

Evidence: 29 • authority: 88

Japanese in the world. The genesis and trajectories of Japanese diaspora communities around the world reflect the history of international population movement, cultural and educational orientation, and the language situations of those communities. The diversity of Japanese communities ranges from the older sites of migrant labour diaspora in North and South America and the Pacific—with the disappearance of their historic nihon machi in Southeast Asia—to the shrinkage of colonial Japanese speech communities in the northwest Pacific. It ranges from the modern lifestyle communities of permanent and long-term residents in European cities like Düsseldorf and Paris, to the social fluidities of ki…

Evidence: 29 • authority: 72

Portuguese (endonym: português) is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European language family, written in the Latin script. With approximately 267 million native speakers, it is the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, and the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the official language of eight countries — Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor-Leste — and is co-official with other languages in Macau, Equatorial Guinea, Goa Portuguese-speaking people or nations are known as Lusophone (lusófono). As a result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese speakers is also…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 80

Where Did the Japanese Language and Its Speakers Come From?

Evidence: — • authority: 72

This is a list of official languages by country and territory. It includes all languages that have official language status either statewide or in a part of the state, or that have status as a national language, regional language, or minority language.

Evidence: — • authority: 72

A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. The term is applied quite differently in various contexts. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country may be referred to informally or designated in legislation as national languages of the country. National languages are mentioned in over 150 world constitutions. C.M.B. Brann, with particular reference to India, suggests that there are "four quite distinctive meanings" for national language in a polity: "Territorial language" (chthonolect, sometimes known as chtonolect) of a particular people "Regional language" (choralect) "La…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Ainu, also known as Hokkaido Ainu (Japanese: 北海道アイヌ語), is a language native to the Ainu people of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, considered to be an independent language family with no academic consensus regarding its origin. Until the 20th century, the three Ainu languages – Hokkaido Ainu, Kuril Ainu, and Sakhalin Ainu – were spoken throughout Hokkaido, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small communities in the Kuril Islands, up to the southern tip of Kamchatka. Following the colonization of Hokkaido, the number of Hokkaido Ainu speakers declined steadily throughout the 20th century, eventually becoming critically enda…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The language is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influence of the British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the rise of the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second‑language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third‑most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is eithe…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian, and English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. Whil…