Japanese introduction

From UniLang Wiki

Japanese is spoken by about 123 million people, the vast majority of whom live in Japan where it is the national language. By the number of speakers Japanese ranks 9th among the most spoken languages worldwide.

The linguistic classification of Japanese is still a subject of hot debate. There are theories linking it to Korean, to the Altaic family, to the Polynesian languages, and to Ainu. However, none of these theories has grown wide support yet, and many linguists see it as an isolated language.

Structurally Japanese is an agglutinating language; the normal word order is SOV.

The Japanese writing system is one of the most complicated in the world: it uses about 2,000 Chinese characters (called kanji), two syllabic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), and in some cases also Latin letters.