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Abbreviations are common in Japanese; these include many Latin alphabet letter combinations, generally pronounced as initialisms.Some of these combinations are common in English, but others are unique to Japan or of Japanese origin, and form a kind of wasei eigo (Japanese-coined English).
Japanese has no official status in Japan, [21] but is the de facto national language of the country. There is a form of the language considered standard: hyōjungo (標準語), meaning "standard Japanese", or kyōtsūgo (共通語), "common language", or even "Tokyo dialect" at times. [22]
Japanese also makes extensive use of adopted Chinese characters, or kanji, which may be pronounced with one or more syllables. Therefore, when a word or phrase is abbreviated, it does not take the form of initials, but the key characters of the original phrase, such that a new word is made, often recognizably derived from the original.
The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, called keishō (敬称), which includes honorific suffixes and prefixes when talking to, or referring to others in a conversation. Suffixes are often gender-specific at the end of names, while prefixes are attached to the beginning of many nouns.
The Japanese names for Japan are Nihon (にほん ⓘ) and Nippon (にっぽん ⓘ). They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本. Since the third century, Chinese called the people of the Japanese archipelago something like "ˀWâ" (倭), which can also mean "dwarf" or "submissive".
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.
Nevertheless, after centuries of development, there is a notable number of kanji used in modern Japanese which have different meaning from hanzi used in modern Chinese. Such differences are the result of: the use of characters created in Japan, characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and
Japanese text is written with a mixture of kanji, katakana and hiragana syllabaries. Almost all kanji originated in China, and may have more than one meaning and pronunciation. Kanji compounds generally derive their meaning from the combined kanji.