Japanese language

Language of East Asia, spoken almost exclusively in the islands of Japan. Traditionally isolated, but possibly related to Korean, Japanese was influenced by Mandarin Chinese especially in the 6th–9th centuries and is written in Chinese-derived ideograms supplemented by two syllabic systems.

Japanese has a well-defined structure of syllables; words end with a vowel or n (futon, jūdō, ninja, kimono, shōgun, sumō, tōfu). The distinction between long and short vowels affects meaning (long ones are usually, as in this volume, indicated by a macron, or line over the letter). Japanese is written in a triple system: its kanji ideograms are close to their Chinese originals; hiragana is a syllabary for the general language; and katakana is a syllabary for foreign names and borrowings. In print, the three systems blend on the page much as when italic type is used together with roman. English words belong in gairaigo, the foreign vocabulary expressed in the syllable signs of katakana (fairu ‘file’, ereganto ‘elegant’), and are often shortened in the process (fainda ‘viewfinder’, wapuro ‘word-processor’)

Japanese words have entered English for over five centuries. More recently, English words have travelled to Japan (e.g. salary and man), and taken on new meanings (as in sarariman, a low-level manager), then returned to English (as salaryman).