Japanese Language
日本語
Linguistic Classification Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent.
Number of Speakers Approximately 127 million people speak Japanese, making it the 13th most spoken language globally.
Global Presence Outside Japan, Japanese is spoken by approximately 200,000 speakers in mainland North America, 220,000 in Hawaii, and 380,000 in South America, especially in Brazil.
Writing System Japanese utilizes a combination of logographic kanji (Chinese characters) and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.