The extant Japonic languages belong to two well-defined branches: Japanese and Ryukyuan. Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern
Kyushu from the
Korean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of the
Yayoi culture and spread throughout the
Japanese archipelago, replacing indigenous languages. The former wider distribution of
Ainu languages is confirmed by placenames in northern
Honshu ending in (from Ainu 'river') and (from Ainu 'stream'). Somewhat later, Japonic languages also spread southward to the
Ryukyu Islands. There is fragmentary placename evidence that now-extinct Japonic languages were still spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula several centuries later.
Japanese Japanese is the de facto national language of
Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is
Old Japanese, which was recorded using
Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries. It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. The script also distinguished eight vowels (or diphthongs), with two each corresponding to modern
i,
e and
o. Most of the texts reflect the speech of the area around
Nara, the eighth-century Japanese capital, but over 300 poems were written in
eastern dialects of Old Japanese. The language experienced a massive influx of
Sino-Japanese vocabulary after the introduction of
Buddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and the 9th centuries. The loanwords now account for about half the lexicon. They also affected the sound system of the language by adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals, and geminate consonants, which became separate
morae. Most of the changes in morphology and syntax reflected in the modern language took place during the
Late Middle Japanese period (13th to 16th centuries). Modern mainland
Japanese dialects, spoken on
Honshu,
Kyushu,
Shikoku, and
Hokkaido, are generally grouped as follows: • Eastern Japanese, including most dialects from
Nagoya east, including the modern standard Tokyo dialect. • Western Japanese, including most dialects west of Nagoya, including the
Kyoto dialect. • Kyushu dialects, spoken on the island of Kyushu, including the
Kagoshima dialect/Satsugū dialect, spoken in
Kagoshima Prefecture in southern Kyushu. The early capitals of Nara and
Kyoto lay within the western area, and their
Kansai dialect retained its prestige and influence long after the capital was moved to
Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1603. Indeed, the Tokyo dialect has several western features not found in other eastern dialects. Post-war geolinguistic studies have identified bundles of
isoglosses, often coinciding with geographic features. • A large bundle, running north–south through the
Japanese Alps, forms the basis of the traditional East–West dialect division. • Another set of isoglosses separates peripheral areas, mainly northern
Honshu and western
Kyushu but also
Izumo and the southern part of the
Kii Peninsula, from the central area. Numerous innovations have spread through the central area, with the peripheral areas preserving older forms. Researchers have found it more difficult to explain other isoglosses in which peripheral areas share mergers of pitch accent classes and reduction of vowel sequences that are preserved in the central area, particularly the
Kansai region. • Several isoglosses run roughly east–west, from
Fukushima to the western end of
Honshu, and corresponding to the 0 °C
isotherm and 1000 mm
isohyet. The
Hachijō language, spoken on
Hachijō-jima and the
Daitō Islands, including
Aogashima, is highly divergent and varied. It has a mix of conservative features inherited from
Eastern Old Japanese and influences from modern Japanese, making it difficult to classify. Hachijō is an
endangered language, with a small population of elderly speakers.
Ryukyuan The Ryukyuan languages were originally and traditionally spoken throughout the
Ryukyu Islands, an
island arc stretching between the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the
island of Taiwan. Most of them are considered "definitely" or "critically endangered" because of the spread of mainland Japanese. Since Old Japanese displayed several innovations that are not shared with Ryukyuan, the two branches must have separated before the 7th century. The move from Kyushu to the Ryukyus may have occurred later and possibly coincided with the rapid expansion of the agricultural
Gusuku culture in the 10th and 11th centuries. Such a date would explain the presence in
Proto-Ryukyuan of Sino-Japanese vocabulary borrowed from
Early Middle Japanese. After the migration to the Ryukyus, there was limited influence from mainland Japan until the conquest of the
Ryukyu Kingdom by the
Satsuma Domain in 1609. Ryukyuan varieties are considered dialects of Japanese in Japan but have little intelligibility with Japanese or even among one another. They are divided into northern and southern groups, corresponding to the physical division of the chain by the 250 km-wide
Miyako Strait.
Northern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the northern part of the chain, including the major
Amami and
Okinawa Islands. They form a single
dialect continuum, with mutual unintelligibility between widely separated varieties. The major varieties are, from northeast to southwest: •
Kikai, on the island of
Kikaijima. •
Northern Amami Ōshima, spoken in most of
Amami Ōshima •
Southern Amami Ōshima, spoken in
Setouchi on the southern end of Amami Ōshima. •
Tokunoshima, on the island of
Tokunoshima. •
Okinoerabu, on the island of
Okinoerabujima •
Yoron, on the island of
Yoronjima. •
Kunigami or Northern Okinawan, spoken in the northern part of
Okinawa Island, including the cities of
Nakijin and
Nago. •
(Central) Okinawan, spoken in the central and southern parts of Okinawa Island, and neighboring islands. The prestige dialect is spoken in
Naha, and the former city of
Shuri. The Shuri dialect was the lingua franca of the Ryukyuan Kingdom, and was first recorded in the 16th century, particularly in the
Omoro Sōshi anthology. There is no agreement on the subgrouping of the varieties. One proposal, adopted by the UNESCO ''
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'', has three subgroups, with the central "Kunigami" branch comprising varieties from Southern Amami to Northern Okinawan, based on similar vowel systems and patterns of lenition of stops. Pellard suggests a binary division based on shared innovations, with an Amami group including the varieties from Kikai to Yoron, and an Okinawa group comprising the varieties of Okinawa and smaller islands to its west.
Southern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the southern part of the chain, the
Sakishima Islands. They comprise three distinct dialect continua: •
Miyako is spoken in the
Miyako Islands, with dialects on
Irabu and
Tarama. •
Yaeyama is spoken in the
Yaeyama Islands (except Yonaguni), with dialects on each island, but primarily
Ishigaki Island,
Iriomote Island, and
Taketomi Island. •
Yonaguni, spoken on
Yonaguni Island, is phonologically distinct but lexically closer to other Yaeyama varieties. The southern Ryukyus were settled by Japonic-speakers from the northern Ryukyus in the 13th century, leaving no linguistic trace of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.
Alternative classifications An alternative classification, based mainly on the development of the
pitch accent, groups the highly divergent
Kagoshima dialects of southwestern Kyushu with Ryukyuan in a Southwestern branch. Kyushu and Ryukyuan varieties also share some lexical items, some of which appear to be innovations. The internal classification by Elisabeth de Boer includes Ryukyuan as a deep subbranch of a Kyūshū–Ryūkyū branch: •
Japonic • Eastern • Central • Izumo–Tōhoku • Kyūshū–Ryūkyū She also proposes a branch consisting of the
Izumo dialect (spoken on the northern coast of western Honshu) and the
Tōhoku dialects (northern Honshu), which show similar developments in the pitch accent that she attributes to sea-borne contacts.
Peninsular Japonic There is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula. Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan as
Insular Japonic. The most-cited evidence comes from chapter 37 of the (compiled in 1145), which contains a list of pronunciations and meanings of placenames in the former kingdom of
Goguryeo. As the pronunciations are given using
Chinese characters, they are difficult to interpret, but several of those from central Korea, in the area south of the
Han River captured from
Baekje in the 5th century, seem to correspond to Japonic words. Scholars differ on whether they represent the language of Goguryeo or the people that it conquered. Traces from the south of the peninsula are very sparse: • The
Silla placenames listed in Chapter 34 of the are not glossed, but many of them can be explained as Japonic words. •
Alexander Vovin proposes Japonic etymologies for two of four Baekje words given in the
Book of Liang (635). • A single word is explicitly attributed to the language of the southern
Gaya confederacy, in Chapter 44 of the . It is a word for 'gate' and appears to have a similar form to the
Old Japanese word , with the same meaning. • Vovin suggests that the ancient name for the kingdom of
Tamna on
Jeju Island, , may have a Japonic etymology 'valley settlement' or 'people's settlement'. He also proposes Japonic etymologies for two other local words.
Proposed external relationships According to
Shirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language. None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family. The most systematic comparisons have involved
Korean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japonic languages. Common vocabulary between the two languages was noted in 1719 by
Arai Hakuseki, who listed 82 items.
Samuel Elmo Martin,
J. Marshall Unger, John Whitman and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences. However,
Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting that the former is an early loan from Korean. He suggests that to eliminate such early loans, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic. In response, Whitman narrowed his list of cognates, and also identified 12 common inflectional morphemes, but Vovin has identified problems with these morphemes. A serious problem for proposals to link the two languages is the lack of shared basic vocabulary. Even scholars who argue for a relationship agree that it would be distant. == Typology ==