日本語 Nihongo
Native Speakers: 126 million; L2 Speakers: 1 million
Japan, Australasia
Official: Japan; Recognized minority language in Palau
Japonic
An agglutinative language with a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. Particles are used to mark the grammatical function of words. The basic sentence structure is topic-comment and it often indicates the topic separately from the subject. Japanese makes use of a highly complex system of honorific speech used to denote different social classes and inter-personal relationships between the speakers in a conversation.
“Modern Japanese” did not take root until after World War II. The “standard” version of the language is based on the Tokyo dialect, with a number of regional variations, although most dialects are mutually intelligible, with some differences in phonology, lexicon, and syntax.
A combination of Chinese characters (kanji) as well as two alpha-syllabaries (hiragana and katakana).
There are roughly 460,000 Japanese speakers in the United States. The largest communities of Japanese speakers can be found in California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington. In Hawaii, Japanese-Americans represent approximately one-fifth of the population and roughly 12% of the population of Hawaii speaks Japanese.
At Latitude Prime, we offer Japanese translation, Japanese interpretation, and Japanese localization services in numerous specialized subject areas and multiple dialects. Whether you need to translate a chemical patent from Japanese into English, need a Japanese interpreter for an international business negotiation, or want to localize your website into Japanese to market your products or services in Japan, Latitude Prime has the customized language solution to meet all of your Japanese language needs.
