Japanese language

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{{Infobox Language |name=Japanese |nativename=日本語 Nihongo |familycolor=Isolate |states=Japan, Hawaii, Brazil, Guam, Marshall Islands, Palau, Taiwan |speakers=127 million |rank=9 |fam1=Altaic (disputed) |fam2=Japonic |nation=Angaur (Palau)
De facto in Japan |agency=None
Japanese government plays major role |iso1=ja|iso2=jpn|iso3=jpn}} Japanese (日本語, Template:Audio) is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically-distinctive pitch accent system. Its recorded history goes back to the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled.

Japanese is written primarily in Chinese characters (called kanji) and hiragana, supplimented by katakana for certain uses. Hiragana and katakana are a pair of syllabaries originally derived from Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet (called rōmaji) is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Chinese/Japanese numberings are also commonplace.

The Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created on Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed huge numbers of words from Western languages, primarily English.

Contents

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Classification

Template:Main Historical linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, the other member being Ryukyuan. However, the origins and relation of Japonic itself is unknown at this point. (An older view, still held by many non-specialists, is that Japanese is a language isolate.)

As for its relation to other languages, there are several theories:

  • Japanese is a relative of extinct languages spoken by historic cultures of Korea and Manchuria.
  • Japanese is related to the Uralic langauges.
  • Japanese is a relative of Korean.
  • Japanese is a member of the Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish, and (according to most proponents) Korean.
  • Japanese is a creole language, possibily with an Austronesian component.
  • Japanese is a purely Austronesian language. This theory is not supported by any mainstream Austronesianist or specialist on Japanese.
  • Japanese is related to Tamil and possibly other Dravidian languages. Outside of its proposer and a few others, this theory also has no mainstream support.

It should be noted that linguistic studies, like all fields, can be strongly affected by national politics and other non-academic factors. For example, most linguists would say that Romanian and Moldovan are essentially the same language, yet they are known as two different languages for political reasons. Japan's long-standing rivalries and enmities with virtually all of its neighbours make the study of linguistic connection particularly fraught with such political tensions. However, these tensions are nearly absent among Western researchers.

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Geographic distribution

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken elsewhere. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programmes. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or in addition to the local languages. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil) frequently employ Japanese as their primary language. In addition to Brazil, Japanese emigrants are also to be found in large numbers in Peru, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne), and the United States (notably California and Hawaii). There is also a small emigrant community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.

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Official status

Japanese is the official language of Japan, and Japan is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: Template:Nihongo or standard Japanese, and Template:Nihongo or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.

Standard Japanese can also be divided into Template:Nihongo or "literary language," and Template:Nihongo or "oral language", which have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until the late 1940s, and still has relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kōgo is the predominant method of speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.

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Dialects

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Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to the mountainous island terrain and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, particle usage, and pronunciation. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.

Dialects from less central regions, such as the Tōhoku or Tsushima dialect may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The dialect used in Kagoshima in southern Kyūshū is famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyūshū as well. Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect. Kansai-ben, a group of dialects from west-central Japan, is spoken by many Japanese; the Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy.

The Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages. Due to the close relationship of Ryukyuan and Japanese, they are still sometimes said to be only dialects of one language, but modern scholars consider them to be separate languages.

Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide, due not only to television and radio, but also to increased mobility within Japan due to its system of roads, railways, and airports. Young people usually speak their local dialect and the standard language, though in most cases, the local dialect is influenced by the standard, and regional versions of "standard" Japanese have local-dialect influence.

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Sounds

Template:Main Template:IPA notice Japanese vowels are "pure" sounds, similar to their Italian or Spanish counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel Template:IPA, which is like Template:IPA, but compressed instead of rounded. Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, so each one has both a short and a long version.

Some Japanese consonants have several allophones, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese up to and including the first half of the twentieth century, the phonemic sequence Template:IPA was palatalized and realized phonetically as Template:IPA, approximately chi; however, now Template:IPA and Template:IPA are distinct, as evidenced by words like paatii Template:IPA "party" and chi Template:IPA "ground."

The syllabic structure and the phonotactics are very simple: the only consonant clusters allowed within a syllable consist of one of a subset of the consonants plus /j/. However, consonant clusters across syllables are common, though limited in type.

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Grammar

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Sentence structure

The basic Japanese word order is Subject Object Verb. Subject and object are usually marked by particles which come after the word.

The basic sentence structure is topic-comment. For example, Kochira wa Tanaka san desu. Kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa. The verb is desu ("is"). As a phrase, Tanaka san desu is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". Thus Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it indicates the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. The sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai. literally means, "As for elephants, their noses are long". The topic is zō "elephant", and the subject is hana "nose".

Japanese is a pro-drop language, meaning that the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. As a result, Japanese speakers tend to omit words from sentences, rather than refer to them with pronouns. In the context of the above example, hana ga nagai would mean "[their] noses are long", while nagai by itself would mean "[they] are long". A single verb can be a complete sentence: Yatta! "[I / we / they / etc] did [it]!". Another well-known example of omission is the sentence Watashi wa supagetti desu—which initially appears to mean "I am spaghetti", but in the context of a restaurant could also be an order: "For me, [it'll] be spaghetti".

While the language has some "pronouns", such as personal pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in Indo-European languages, and function somewhat differently. Instead, Japanese typically relies on auxiliary verbs to indicate the "direction" of an action "down" to the speaker or persons related to the speaker, or "up" to the listener or other person. For example, setsumei shite moratta (literally, "[I] obtained explaining") means "[he/she] explained it to [me/us]". Similarly, oshiete ageta (literally, "taught-handed up") is commonly used to mean "[I/we] told [him/her]". Such "directional" auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages.

Japanese "pronouns" also function differently than Indo-European pronouns in that they can take modifiers as any other nouns may. For instance, you cannot say in English:

*The big he ran down the street. (ungrammatical)

But you can grammatically say essentially the same thing in Japanese:

Ōkī kare wa michi o hashitte itta. (grammatically correct)

This is partly due to the fact that Japanese pronouns evolved from regular nouns as indirect references, such as kimi "you" (君 "ruler"), anata "you" (貴方 "that side, yonder"), and boku "I" (僕 "servant"). This is why some linguists do not classify Japanese "pronouns" as pure pronouns, but rather as referential nouns.

Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situations implying some emphasis. The choice of pronouns used is correlated with the gender of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as watashi, while men in rougher conversation are much more likely to use the word ore. Similarly, different pronouns such as anata, kimi, and omae may be used to refer to a listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity with the listener.

Japanese often use social titles of the person referred in place of the pronouns used in English. For example, when speaking to one's teacher, one more appropriately uses sensei (先生, teacher) rather than anata. It is regarded as impolite to use the general pronoun anata to refer to persons of superior rank who have a professional or otherwise distant relationship with the speaker, as pronouns imply a certain degree of intimacy which might be inappropriate for some social situations. Much as one would not shout out a friend's embarassing nickname in a crowd, but might use it among friends, so too would it be inappropriate to use anata with one's boss at work, whereas it might be perfectly fitting to use it when out drinking and not in a work context.

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Inflection and conjugation

Japanese nouns have neither number nor gender. Thus hon may mean "book" or "books". It is possible to explicitly indicate more than one, either by providing a quantity (often with a counter word) or by adding a suffix (which is rare). Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus Tanaka san usually means Mr/Ms Tanaka. Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate a group of individuals with noun suffixes that indicate groups, such as -tachi. Though some words, like hitobito "people", always refer to more than one, Japanese nouns without such additions are neither singular nor plural. Hito could mean "person" or "persons", ki could be "tree" or "trees" without any implied preference for singular or plural.

Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present, or non-past, which is used for the present and the future. For verbs that represent an ongoing process, the -te iru form indicates a continuous (or progressive) tense. For others that represent a change of state, the -te iru form indicates a perfect tense. For example, kite iru means "He has come (and is still here)", but tabete iru means "He is eating".

Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle ka is added. For example, Ii desu "It is OK" becomes Ii desu ka "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle no is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: Dōshite konai no? "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: Kore wa? "(What about) this?"; Namae wa? "(What's your) name?".

Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb. For example, Pan o taberu "I will eat bread" or "I eat bread" becomes Pan o tabenai "I will not eat bread" or "I do not eat bread".

The so-called -te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence (Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions (Dekakete mo ii? "May I go out?"), etc.

The word da (plain), desu (polite) is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English be, but often takes on other roles. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence ("there is") or, in some contexts, property: aru (negative nai) and iru (negative inai), for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, Neko ga iru "There's a cat", Ii kangae ga nai "[I] haven't got a good idea".

The verb "to do" (suru, polite form shimasu) is often used to make verbs from nouns (ai suru "to love", benkyō suru "to study", etc.). Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs to express concepts that are described in English using a verb and a preposition (e.g. tobidasu "to fly out, to flee," from tobu "to fly, to jump" + dasu "to go out").

There are three types of adjective (see also Japanese adjectives):

  1. keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i (such as atsui, "to be hot") which can become past (atsukatta - "it was hot"), or negative (atsuku nai - "it is not hot"). Note that nai is also an i adjective, which can become past (atsuku nakatta - it was not hot).
    atsui hi "a hot day".
  2. keiyōdōshi, or na adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula, usually na. For example hen (strange)
    hen na hito "a strange person".
  3. rentaishi, also called true adjectives, such as onaji "the same"
    onaji hi "the same day".

Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi may predicate sentences. For example,

Gohan ga atsui. "The rice is hot."
Kare wa hen da. "He's strange."

Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs. The rentaishi are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include ookina "big" and onaji "the same" (although there is a noun onaji that can be followed by da, as in onaji da).

Both keiyōdōshi and keiyōshi form adverbs, by following with ni in the case of keiyōdōshi:

hen ni naru "become strange",

and by changing i to ku in the case of keiyōshi:

atsuku naru "become hot".

The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include for example:

  • no for possession, or nominalizing phrases.
Watashi no kamera "My camera" / Sukii ni iku no ga suki desu "(I) like going skiing."
  • ga for subject.
Kare ga yatta. "He did it."
  • o for direct object
Nani o tabemasu ka? "What will (you) eat?"
  • ni for indirect object.
Tanaka san ni kiite kudasai "Please ask Mr./Ms. Tanaka".
  • wa for the topic.
Watashi wa tai ryōri ga ii desu. "As for me, Thai food is good." (Note that English generally makes no distinction between sentence topic and subject.)
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Politeness

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Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.

Broadly speaking, there are three main politeness levels in spoken Japanese: the plain form (kudaketa 砕けた or futsuu 普通), the simple polite form (teineigo 丁寧語) and the advanced polite form (keigo 敬語).

Since most relationships are not equal in Japanese society, one person typically has a higher position. This position is determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner. See uchi-soto

The plain form in Japanese is recognized by the shorter, dictionary form of verbs, and the da form of the copula. At the teinei level, verbs end with the helping verb -masu, and the copula desu is used. The advanced polite form, keigo, actually consists of two kinds of politeness: honorific language (sonkeigo) and humble (kenjōgo) language. Whereas teineigo is an inflectional system, keigo often employs many special (often irregular) honorific and humble verb forms: iku "to go" becomes ikimasu in polite form, but is replaced by mairimasu in humble form and irasshaimasu in honorific form.

The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and his group. For example, the -san suffix ("Mr", "Mrs" or "Ms") is an example of honorific language. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's "group".

Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o- or go-; as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a female speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu merely to show politeness; this contrasts with the more abrupt speech of men (though men may also use very polite forms when speaking to superiors). See Gender differences in spoken Japanese.

Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity. That is, they use polite forms for new acquaintances, but if a relationship becomes more intimate, they no longer use them. This occurs regardless of age, social class, or gender.

Many researchers report that since the 1990s, the use of polite forms has become rarer. Needless to say, many older people disapprove of this trend. Young people usually receive extensive training in the "proper" use of polite language when they start to work for a company.

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Vocabulary

The original language of Japan was the so-called yamato kotoba. In addition to words from this original language, present-day Japanese includes a great number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots following Chinese patterns. These words, known as kango, entered the language from the fifth century onwards via contact with Chinese culture, both directly and through Korea. Chinese-based words comprise as much as seventy percent of the total vocabulary of the Japanese language and form as much as thirty to forty percent of words used in speech.

Like Latin-derived words in English, kango words typically are perceived as somewhat formal/academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.

A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from Korean and Ainu. Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, gairaigo. This began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French and English. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.

In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese patterns to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji characters in the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, 政治 seiji ("politics"), and 化学 kagaku ("chemistry"). As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greco-Roman words is shared among European languages.

In the past few decades, wasei-eigo (made-in-Japan English) has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as wanpataan (< one + pattern, "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and sukinshippu (< skin + -ship, "physical contact"), although coined from English, are nonsensical in a non-Japanese context. A small number of such words have been borrowed back into English.

Additionally, many native Japanese words have become commonplace in English, due to the popularity of many Japanese cultural exports. Words such as sushi, judo, karate, sumo, karaoke, origami, samurai, haiku, ninja, sayonara, rickshaw (from 人力車 jinrikisha), futon, and many others have become part of the English language. See list of English words of Japanese origin for more.

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Writing system

Template:Main Before the 5th century, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. They began to adopt the Chinese writing script along with many other aspects of Chinese culture after their introduction by Korean monks and scholars during the 5th and 6th centuries AD.

At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, or in a mixture of Chinese, used both ideographically, phonetically, and otherwise to create Japanese meanings. An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, a ten thousand syllabic script which used characters depicting their own values.

Over time, a writing system was constructed. Chinese characters (kanji) were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements, were simplified, and eventually became two syllabic scripts: hiragana and katakana.

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main syllabaries: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet (romaji) is also sometimes used. Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji characters when used in counting, but the kanji is still used when in a compound (such as 統一 (tōitu), "unification").

Hiragana is the base of all texts in Japan, providing correct pronunciation and spelling. It is used for words without Kanji representation and also for when the Kanji character is not known. Katakana is the character group, with the same sounds, and similar combinations of Hiragana, which is used to create representations of foreign words in the Japanese sense. Words such as "Australia" and "Supermarket" have been shortened or changed into "Oosutoraria" and "Suupaa" respectively. "Romaji" is simply the Japanese name for Latin characters. It is used increasingly in Japanese text for especially technical abbreviations such as "CD", "DVD", etc.

Japanese students begin to learn kanji characters from their first year at elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of kyōiku kanji, specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 939 characters in junior high school, covering in total 1,945 jōyō kanji (common kanji) characters, which is generally considered sufficient for everyday life, although many kanji used in everyday life are not included in the list (like the one for chopstick, 箸). An appendix of 290 additional characters for names was decreed in 1951. Various semi-official bodies were set up to monitor and enforce restrictions on the use of kanji in the press, publishing, in television broadcasts, etc. Thereafter, the official list of kyōiku kanji was repeatedly revised, but the total number of "permitted" characters remained largely unchanged.

A different list of officially approved kanji is used for purposes of registering personal names. Names containing "unapproved" characters are denied registration. However, as with the list of kyōiku kanji, criteria for inclusion were often arbitrary and led to many common and popular characters being disapproved for use. Under popular pressure and following a court decision holding the exclusion of common characters unlawful, the list of "approved" characters was substantially extended.

Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War. During the period of post-war occupation (and influenced by the "rational" views of some U.S. officials), various schemes including the complete abolition of kanji and exclusive use of Romaji were considered. The kyōiku kanji scheme arose as a compromise solution.

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Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese involves understanding grammar, pronunciation, the writing system, and acquiring adequate vocabulary. While the sound system is simple to master compared with those of other languages, the writing system poses a challenge for those not used to Chinese characters.

Japanese can be learned without studying Chinese characters. However, the Japanese have borrowed thousands upon thousands of words from the Chinese, and for various reasons, many of these Chinese-based words are now homophones (words pronounced identically) in Japanese. This may make it necessary to learn the characters if one wants to learn an extended vocabulary. Nevertheless, blind Japanese people who cannot read any characters are able to function in the spoken language without problems, since most words, even if not written down, can be understood by the context. For example, "Nihon" (にほん) can mean "two long, thin objects" (二本) as well as "Japan" (日本). However, these two words have different accents, and are distinct even in isolation.

Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language. International interest in the Japanese language dates to the 1800s but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s and beyond. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003: 900,000 South Koreans, 389,000 Chinese people, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans study Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. Furthermore, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including Japanese Brazilians and foreigners married to Japanese nationals.

The Japanese government provides standard tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the Business Japanese Proficiency Test, to test ability to understand Japanese in a business setting.

See also List of resources for learning Japanese.

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See also

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External links

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Bibliography

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  • Tsujimura, Natsuko. (1996). An introduction to Japanese linguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-9855-5 (hbk); ISBN 0-6311-9856-3 (pbk). Upper Level Textbooks
  • Tsujimura, Natsuko. (Ed.) (1999). The handbook of Japanese linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6312-0504-7. Readings/AnthologiesTemplate:Link FA

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