|
Serving
Students at
Santa Ana
College and
Santiago
Canyon College
JAPAN
Language
|
Language:
Japanese
Japan has a
population of over 120 million, and linguistically, it is a nearly homogenous
nation, with more than 99% of the population using the same language. This
means that the Japanese language is the sixth most spoken language in the
world. However, the language is spoken in scarcely any region outside
Japan. The Japanese writing system comes from Chinese, although the
languages spoken by the Japanese and Chinese are completely different.
Because the
Japanese language seems to have developed in virtual isolation from other
languages, there is no conclusive evidence relating Japanese to a single
family of languages and to that family's common ancestor language. The
most prominent hypothesis places Japanese in the family of Altaic languages-which
include Turkish, Mongolian, and Korean; however, some scholars have turned
to the languages of the South Pacific, in the family of Austronesian languages,
to find the Japanese language's genetic heritage.
Literacy:
definition:
age
15 and over can read and write
total population:
99%
(1970 est.)
male: NA%
female:
NA%
Links for
More Information
Five
College Foreign Language Resource Center
Beginning Japanese
Language
Japanese
Language
Lessons with Sound Files
..
Sources:
U.
S. Department of State
Central
Intelligence Agency
Library
of Congress |
