historia: 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: 43 • 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: 36 • authority: 72

The Romance languages, less commonly known as the Latin languages, are the languages that directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant (living) subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The most prominent Romance languages include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in the 15th century. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. French, Spanish, and Portuguese also have many non-native speakers; they are widely used as lingua f…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

Japanese as a foreign language is studied by foreigners in Japan and non-native speakers worldwide, including those with Japanese ancestry. Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language.

Evidence: 29 • authority: 88

Can Language Direct Speakers' Attention in Causal Events?: An Empirical Study between Japanese and English Speakers. This thesis sheds lights on the relationship between descriptions of causal events and their effects on speakers’ memory. English and Japanese are similar in that speakers can use the same constructions when describing intentional events – both comfortably use transitive sentences. However, they are different when describing non-intentional events. English speakers can use the same construction as intentional events, while Japanese speakers prefer to mark that the event is accidental. They tend to add accidental markers to cancel the agent’s intention frequently. In Experimen…

Evidence: 29 • authority: 88

Can Language Direct Speakers' Attention in Causal Events?: An Empirical Study between Japanese and English Speakers. This thesis sheds lights on the relationship between descriptions of causal events and their effects on speakers’ memory. English and Japanese are similar in that speakers can use the same constructions when describing intentional events – both comfortably use transitive sentences. However, they are different when describing non-intentional events. English speakers can use the same construction as intentional events, while Japanese speakers prefer to mark that the event is accidental. They tend to add accidental markers to cancel the agent’s intention frequently. In Experimen…

Evidence: 29 • 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: 29 • authority: 72

This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, while Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language, but sometimes considered multiple languages. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani. Rankings of languages should therefore be used with caution, as…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 80

A study of Japanese Native Speakers’ perception on the ‘customer-reception’ behavior of Korean Native Speakers: Focus on situations of the ‘customer-reception’ using the Japanese language in Korea

Evidence: 21 • authority: 88

<i>L’esprit de celui qui parle</i> Wilhelm von Humboldt on Japanese and its Speakers. Unbeknownst to most, Humboldt studied also Japanese in order to better grasp universal aspects of language. Humboldt’s interest in Japanese is based on his teleological view of language. According to Humboldt, language is the expression of a nation’s worldview and is, over time, subject to development and refinement. Japanese served Humboldt as an example to step back in time, so to speak, and he attempts to gain new insights into the origin of language by studying selected aspects of the Japanese language. While deeply original in his analysis, Humboldt falls victim to the Eurocentric bias of his approach…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 80

The study of Japanese language speakers

Evidence: 21 • 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…