| Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 4th
century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects
of Chinese culture, probably via Korea.
Japanese is spoken by over 130 million
people in Japan and in Japanese
emigrant communities.
Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of katakana, hiragana,
and kanji.Japanese texts may
include romaji, Roman letters, the standard way of writing Japanese with
the Latin alphabet, eimoji
(English script), non-Japanese words written in their own script and various
symbols known as kigo.
Notable features
Direction of writing, right to left in vertical columns or left to right
in horizontal lines.
Type of writing system: mixed (kana syllabaries + semanto-phonetic kanji)
Horizontal writing was first used during the Meiji Period (1868-1912)
in Western language dictionaries of Japanese.
Today both orientations are used.
Japanese - a modified version of katakana is also used to write Ainu. |
