Japanese is spoken by approximately 121 million people. It is almost exclusively spoken by the people that live in the islands of Japan. Because of the physical isolation of the Japanese language, its genetic affiliation to other languages or language families is not definitively known (Shibatani 1990).

Japanese is a head-final language, whose basic word-order is SOV. It allows a relatively flexible word-order because particles such as case markers and postpositions agglutinated to nouns and postpositional phrases mark the function of each word independent of its position in a sentence. Two sets of Japanese phonograms, Hiragana and Katakana, which are derived from Chinese characters (Kanji), make the writing system of Japanese a unique one that utilizes those three sets of orthography simultaneously in written language.
    There are some 'myths' about the Japanese language. For example, it is sometimes considered to be an illogical and/or vague language, or it is ... MORE