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Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, ⓘ) 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 official Japanese-language name is Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku (日本国), literally "State of Japan". [18] As an adjective, the term "Dai-Nippon" remains popular with Japanese governmental, commercial, or social organizations whose reach extend beyond Japan's geographic borders (e.g., Dai Nippon Printing , Dai Nippon Butoku Kai , etc.).
There is also a notable history of use of Kanbun (Classical Chinese) as a language of literature and diplomacy in Japan, similar to the status of the Latin language in medieval Europe, which has left an indelible mark on the vocabulary of the Japanese language. Kanbun is a mandatory subject in the curricula of most Japanese secondary schools.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (日本語能力試験, Nihongo Nōryoku Shiken), or JLPT, is a standardized criterion-referenced test to evaluate and certify Japanese language proficiency for non-native speakers, covering language knowledge, reading ability, and listening ability. [1]
The American missionary James Curtis Hepburn edited A Japanese and English Dictionary with an English and Japanese Index (和英語林集成, Shanghai, American Presbyterian Press, 1867), with 20,722 Japanese-English and 10,030 English-Japanese words, on 702 pages. Although designed to be used by missionaries in Japan, this first Japanese ...
While Japanese is the only official language of Japan, other languages such as Ainu [16] and Ryukyuan [17] are spoken on the Japanese islands. Written Japanese uses a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters pronounced as " kanji " ( 漢字 ) in Japanese, hiragana , and katakana .
The Nihongo Kentei (日本語検定, The Japanese Language Examination) is a standardized test of Japanese language proficiency for native Japanese language speakers. The test is held twice a year, in June and November; approximately 300,000 [citation needed] people sit the examination every year.