Diana Garcia - University of Florida

Japanese• ~126 million native speakers, mostly in Japan
• 9th most spoken language in the world, in terms of native speakers
• Both logographic (Kanji) and syllabic (Kana) writing systems
• Originally devoid of writing system, decided to borrow Chinese characters
Japanese Language Features
• SOV word order
• Agglutinative Language
• CVCV structure, with most words ending in a vowel (except for word-final consonant n)
• ~60% of the vocabulary comes from Chinese, aka Sino-Japanese (used much more in
writing than in speech)
• 3 writing systems in use today: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana
Consonants and Vowels
Consonants
• Purpose of use: meaning
• Used to write content words of Japanese and Sino-Japanese origin
Kana Syllabaries
• Hiragana: Used to write words of Japanese origin (along with kanji), inflectional endings of adj. & verbs, function words, etc.
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• Hiragana is the cursive, short style of man’ygana (Chinese
characters used for their pronunciation), a 5th Century practice
• Educated/elites preferred kanji system
• Cursive script for women onnade
• Regular script for men otokode
• Women, not allowed the same level of education, used hiragana exclusively in court during the Heian period (Golden Age of literature)
• Tale of Genji (1008): entirely Hiragana
Inariyama Burial-Mound Sword A.D. 471
Development of Katakana
• 9th Century (early Heian Period) • Buddhist monks took part of man’ygana and wrote katakana as shorthand
Why do we use all three writing systems today?
• Thousands of homonyms!!! • [kanji] (Chinese characters)
• [kanji] (Feeling)
• [kanji] (Secretary) • No spaces in between words to mark boundaries • [watashi no namae wa daiana desu] My name is
Diana. • Kana allow us to write grammar • Kanji allow us to distinguish between the homonyms
Dialect Map
Japonic Language Family
• Isolated language family
• Japanese and Ryukyuan languages make up the Japonic language family, which are not proven to be related to any other languages
• Difficult to reconstruct a proto language due to kanji borrowing + lacking a writing system of their own before this
• Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, Early Modern Japanese, Modern Japanese
• Another theory: Japonic & its speakers may have existed on mainland China & migrated to southern parts of Korea (Silla, Paekche), but was replaced with Koreanic once Japanese population migrated to Japan
• Language of the Kofun culture (300–538) , or perhaps the Yayoi culture (300 BC–300 AD)?
Theoretical Altaic Language Family
• Hotly debated, not generally accepted by Historical Linguists
• Even though other languages have many similarities, a strong genealogical
connection is not linguistically proven
Ryukyuan Languages
• What happened?
Ainu Language
• Language isolate, not related to Japanese • Did not have writing, history
transmitted orally • Many place names in Northern Japan
are of Ainu descent • A lot of language contact with Japanese,
influence on one another • Latin alphabet and Katakana were
originally used to transcribe Ainu
• [ainu] person/man
thing we eat’ • Yuk ka ronnu kamuy ka ronnu
• ‘deer even kill-PL bear (god)
even kill-PL’
The Ainu People
• Ainu are the original inhabitants of Japan, arriving 14,000 years ago (10,000 years before the first JPN)
• Originally hunters and gatherers, as well as fisherman and hunters
• Look like a mix of Caucasian and Asian, with an abundance of hair and sometimes have blue eyes, but genetically, they’re related to the people of Tibet and India’s Andaman Islands
• Today ~25,000 Ainu people left in Hokkaido *number is approximate due to intermarriages/mixing*
DNA: Haplogroup D Locations
Ainu Language Downfall
• A conquered people
• Homeland, Ezo, was renamed Hokkaido in 1869, & the JPN government established the Hokkaido Colonization Board
• The JPN government implemented Ainu assimilation policies in 1871
• Forced to speak Japanese
• Hirame, Hiranuma, Kaizawa, Kawanano, Kayano, Kurokawa, & Nabesawa
• Before this, original surnames were written in katakana
Ainu Attempts at Revitalization
• In 1936, the Hokkaido Ainu Association is established
• Many Ainu language schools were established in the late 1980s in Hokkaido
• Revised Japan Industrial Standard enabled writing of the language using small case katakana and half-voiced sounds in 2000
• Considered critically endangered language today
• Ainu oral literature has been documented as means of preservation