Japanese (English: Japanese; Japanese: Japanese; Japanese pen name: にほんご), also known as Japanese, is the official language of Japan, with 6.5438+25 million native speakers and 654.38+0.6% of the world population using Japanese.

The origin of Japanese has been debated endlessly. Japanese in Meiji era classified Japanese as Altaic language family, which has been generally denied. Mo Hulbert and Xiao Ye King think that Japanese belongs to Dalopita language family, Nishida Takashi thinks that Japanese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and Bai Guisi thinks that Japanese belongs to Japanese Koguryo language family (that is, Fuyu language family).

Leon Angelo serafim believes that Japanese and Ryukyu can form a Japanese language family. There is a hypothesis that Austronesian language family, Zhuang-Dong language family and Japanese language family can form Austronesian-Taiwanese language family, that is, they are all homologous.

In ancient Japan, characters were not used. Chinese characters were introduced from Baekje when Emperor Shen Ying arrived. The Japanese secretary, who wrote entirely in Chinese characters, said: "There were no words in ancient times, and it was passed down from mouth to mouth." In the period of Emperor Shen Ying, Baekje sent Akiki to Japan.

In 285, Wang Ren, a Baekje doctor during the reign of King Xiaogu, brought China's Analects of Confucius and Xiao Jing to Japan, which was the beginning of Japanese contact with Chinese characters. After the Three Kingdoms period, Chinese characters and China culture were formally introduced into Japan in large quantities.