FAI

=**Japanese accent**=
 * Japanese **is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained unanimous acceptance .Japanese is an agglutinative language and a mora-timed language. It has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system. It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation. Japanese vowels are pure. The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet, rōmaji, is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace.

**Geographic distribution** Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and sometimes still is spoken other places. Before and during World War II, when Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, the Philippines, and various Pacific islands,[6] locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programs. As a result, many elderly people in these countries can speak Japanese in addition to the local language. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil,[7] with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendents, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than the 1.2 million of the United States[8]) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 5% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese[citation needed], with Japanese ancestry the largest single ancestry in the state (over 24% of the population). Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Cairns), the United States (notably California, where 1.2% of the population has Japanese ancestry[citation needed], and Hawaii), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao and Laguna). However, their descendants, known as nikkei ( 日系 ) rarely speak Japanese fluently after the second generation. media type="youtube" key="7hO9V_gAs0M?version=3" height="390" width="640"

Sentence structure Japanese word order is classified as Subject Object Verb. However, unlike many Indo-European languages, the only strict rule of word order is that the verb must be placed at the end of a sentence; other elements in the sentence may be in various orders for emphasis, or possibly omitted.[9] This is because the Japanese sentence elements are marked with particles that identify their grammatical functions. 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, a copula, commonly translated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"), though technically it holds no meaning and is used to give a sentence 'politeness'. As a phrase, Tanaka-san desu is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Miss Tanaka." Thus Japanese, like many other Asian languages, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it has a strong tendency to indicate 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". In Japanese, the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. In addition, it is commonly felt, particularly in informal spoken Japanese, that the shorter a sentence is, the better.[citation needed] As a result of this grammatical permissiveness, there is a tendency to gravitate towards brevity; Japanese speakers tend to omit pronouns on the theory they are inferred from the previous sentence, and are therefore understood. 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]!". In addition, since adjectives can form the predicate in a Japanese sentence (below), a single adjective can be a complete sentence: Urayamashii! [I'm] jealous [of it]!". Prehistory Japanese is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from either the mainland or nearby Pacific islands (or both) sometime in the early- to mid-1st century BC, replacing the language of the original [|Jōmon] inhabitants (likely an ancestor of the modern [|Ainu language] ). Very little is known about the Japanese of this period – due to the fact that writing had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence; so anything that can be discerned about this period of Japanese must be based on reconstructions of [|Old Japanese] . media type="youtube" key="WWEO_nqTSw4?version=3" height="390" width="640"
 * Grammar **
 * History **

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