Station
identification: Kochirawa Rajio Nippon, NHK no Kokusai Hoso
desu, English equivalent "This is Radio Japan, the
overseas broadcasting service of NHK in Tokyo" The language of Japan.
The classification of the Japanese language is in dispute. Linguists argue that Japanese is either Altaic , or that it is related to Austronesian languages or that it has elements of both.
All words end in a vowel or n. Vowels can be short or long and many words have four syllables. Japanese differs from the Sino-Tibetan tonal languages in that it has r and no l sounds; it is also not tonal . Japanese has five vowels, (romanised as a, i, u, e , and o and are pronounced like they are in Italian ; and 19 consonants (romanised as k, s, sh , t , ch, ts, n, h, f , m , y, r, w , g, z , j , d, b, and p ). The consonants are pronounced rather like the corresponding English consonants, but ris produced by flapping the tip of the tongue forwards in the mouth. In the body of a word, g is often nasalised, in a similar way to the ngin the English sing. The f is also different from the English f in that it is produced with the lips not touching each other, and in some speakers it is almost indistinguishable from an h. Certain syllables are emphasised in Japanese by differences of pitch or tone, but the language does not stress syllables in the conventional sense.
Station
identification: Kochirawa Rajio Nippon, NHK no Kokusai Hoso
desu, English equivalent "This is Radio Japan, the
overseas broadcasting service of NHK in Tokyo"
| Name | Where spoken | Language Family | How many (000s) |
| Japanese | Japan, Brazil, USA | Isolate (?Altaic) | 120m |
Table source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Ctystal, Cambridge University Press
[Articles/_private/langnavbar.htm]