Japanese is spoken by over 127 million people in Japan as well as by immigrant groups, particularly in Hawai’i and Brazil. Japanese has 15 consonants: /p, b, t, d, k, g, m, n, N, r(flap), s, z, h, w, j/ and a number of allophones.
Japanese has five short vowels, /a, i, u, e, o/, and five long vowels /a:, i:, u:, e:, o:/.
The syllable structure of Japanese can be described in the formula: (C)(j)VV(C).
Only two types of consonant can occur at the end of a syllable:
- a nasal: that can occur at the end of a syllable and/or a word (e.g., /hoN/ [hoN] ‘book,’)
- a plosive or fricative: that can only occur within a word (e.g., /sak.ka/ [sak:a] ‘writer,’)
The only cluster allowed is a two-consonant onset cluster with /j/ in the second position. (e.g., /kjoo/ [kjo:] ‘today’).
Japanese is often cited as a textbook example of a lexical pitch-accent language. All words are either accented or unaccented, and accented words have one accented syllable. The accent consists of a sequence of high and low pitch levels.
Three writing systems are used.
- Kanji, is a set of ideographic characters borrowed from Chinese. The Japanese Ministry of Education teaches a set of 1,945 characters to primary and secondary school students, but most educated people know a few thousand more characters. Each character represents a semantic concept.
- Hiragana has 46 symbols to represent sound units. Hiragana is mainly used to write inflections and various bound morphemes. Each symbol stands for a portion of the syllable. (e.g., /toru/ ‘to take’ is written as とる (to-ru)).
- Katakana also has 46 symbols to represent sound units. Katakana is used to transcribe foreign loanwords.
