Japanese translations for your company

Japanese is the official language of Japan, where it is spoken by around 121 million people. There are also Japanese speakers in the USA, Brazil and the Palau Islands; the total number of speakers is estimated at 127 million.

The linguistic classification of the Japanese language is a matter of some dispute: Since it is grammatically similar to Korean, it could be an Altaic language – on the other hand, it is more likely to be phonetically classified as an Austronesian and Austroasiatic language. It is so closely related to the language of the Ryukyu Islands that some researchers consider this language to be a Japanese dialect. Yet the language of the Ryukyu Islands is just as unclassifiable as Japanese and both are called “Japanese languages.”

Japanese is an agglutinative language in which word relationships are expressed using appended syllables (suffixes). “Sociative causation” is a grammatical feature that indicates differences in gender, rank and status – at the same time, there are numerous words to indicate reverence and courtesy. Syllables are usually spoken openly and accentuated by different pitches; however, Japanese is not a “tonal language.” It has five vowels and 19 consonants. Its vocabulary features numerous Chinese loanwords and, since 1945, an increasing number of English and European loanwords. The Japanese script has evolved from Chinese characters to its own syllabic script with some 2,000 characters and is written in vertical lines from right to left. To some extent, a Latin, left-to-right script with horizontal lines is also used.