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Japanese is probably an isolated language, although some similarities exist to Korean and to the languages of the Altaic family. It is spoken by more than 125 million people as a first language, but the number of people speaking it as a second language is very low.
This is one of the major cultural languages of the world. While in ancient times Japanese scholars wrote in Classical Chinese, literary production in Japanese has never ceased since since the 7th c. Japanese is written in its own script.
Japanese syntax complies with the subject-object-verb (SOV) pattern. It is an agglutinative language, and there are pronouns and particles that indicate the speaker's sex. Very often, elements of the sentence that can be easily conveyed from context are omitted.
The Japanese vocabulary contains a great deal of loanwords coming from Chinese and, more recently, from European languages.
Japanese uses a word-pitch prosodic system that serves the purpose of telling between homophones in speech. This means that every word is assigned a distinctive tone pattern. Unlike in other tone languages like Chinese, pitch is not assigned to every syllable, but to every "mora", which is a suprasegmental unit that need not contain a vowel.
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