Prehistory
Proto-Japonic, the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from the Korean peninsula sometime in the early- to

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Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been spoken outside. Before and during World War II, through Japanese

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Japanese is a member of the Japonic languages family, which also includes the languages spoken throughout the Ryūkyū Islands.

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Vowels
All Japanese vowels are pure – that is, there are no diphthongs, only monophthongs. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel /u/ (listen), which may be compressedrather than rounded and fronted. Japanese has five

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There are three main sources of words in the Japanese language, the yamato kotoba (大和言葉) or wago (和語), kango (漢語), and gairaigo (外来語).
The original language of

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History
Literacy was introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, by way of Baekjebefore

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Sentence structure
Japanese word order is classified as subject–object–verb. Unlike many Indo-European languages, the only strict rule of word order is that the verb

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