Posts Tagged ‘language history’

Brief History Of Japanese Language

About 130 million people speak Japanese. The language is part of the Japonic-Ryukyuan languages. Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan though it is also sometimes spoken in Korea, Taiwan, parts of Chinese mainland, Philippines and some Pacific Islands which were occupied by Japan during and prior to World War II. Japanese emigrant communities as in Brazil, Hawaii, Argentina, Peru, Australia, and the United States too speak the language. However, increasingly the descendants rarely speak fluent Japanese. Japanese is the official language of Japan and the island nation of Palau. The Japanese vocabulary consists of words taken from other languages. Predominant amongst them are the Chinese words, a result of 1,500 years of interaction. It has borrowed words from the Indo-European languages, particularly English in the 19h century and some Portuguese and Dutch in the 16th and 17th century respectively.  Three different types of scripts are combined to make the Japanese language. They are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. The first is the modified Chinese characters while the latter two are two syllabic scripts of the modified Chinese characters.

The standard language taught in schools is Hy?jungo. It is also the official language. But the common form used is the Ky?ts?go. The traditional written language Bungo is no longer much in use but it is the colloquial language K?gothat that is commonly used for writing. Different Japanese dialects are spoken in different parts of Japan. The most dominant dialect is the Tokyo-type. Next is the Kyoto-Osaka-type followed by the Ky?sh?-type. Often the mainstream Japanese do not understand the dialects of the outer regions such as Tsushima or T?hoku or southern Ky?sh?. The Ry?ky?an languages that are spoken in Amami and Okinawa Islands are considered as dialects of Japanese though they are distinct languages. However, the standard Japanese have become predominant with their use in education and mass media.

Japan is the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Its technological superiority is well known. With growth, Japan has expanded its industrial and financial activities globally. The result has also been an increase in the demand for learning Japanese. There are many courses offered to assist learning functional Japanese. Many Japanese language learning packages are available. This includes the Japanese vocabulary builder .

Japan’s emergence as a globally important economic power has popularized the country, its culture and language. Many Japanese words too have found their way into other languages as English. Some of these words are haiku, judo, karate, karaoke, ninja, rickshaw, samurai, tycoon, sudoku, sayonara, sumo, sushi, tsunami and many others.

Introduction To Hindi As A Language

An Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language, Hindi is spoken widely in the central and northern part of India. The language, or its dialects, is spoken by about 41 percent of the people of India. Several hundred languages are spoken by the people of India. The estimated number of language used is 415. In terms of language groups, the Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by about 74 percent of the population while the Dravidian languages are spoken by 24 percent, the Austro-Asiatic (Munda) by 1.2 percent and the Tibeto-Burman by 0.6 percent of the population. Some languages spoken by sections of people living in the Himalayas are not yet classified.

Hindi is the official language of India besides English. There are 22 scheduled languages in India and Hindi is one of them. Fiji, where some 48 percent speak dialects of Hindi, has Hindi as one of its official language. The origin of Hindi is said to be Prakrit. It developed local dialects like Braj and Awadhi and evolved into Khari Boli later in the tenth century. Khari Boli, the dialect spoken in the Delhi region, got Sanskritised to become Hindi. It also got Persianised to become Urdu. The persianisation was over a period of a thousand years when the region was ruled by the Mughal kings whose official language was Persian. The neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan also understand Hindi. Some sections of people in Uganda, South Africa and Singapore also speak the language. After Mandarin (Chinese), Hindi-Urdu is ranked second in terms of the most spoken language, spoken by about 429 million people. A broad variety of Hindi languages including Bundeli, Brij Bhasha, Khari Boli, Kannauji, Awadhi, Maithili, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Magadhi and Bihari languages together is considered to constitute the Hindi language.

Hindi language has been standardized for teaching in the schools across the country. The English, Persian and Arabic words have been removed from Hindi and the language further Sanskritised to develop and promote the official Hindi by the government. But the Hindi used by the media is more neutralized. The government of India has the official policy of encouraging people to learn to speak Hindi.

Hindi and Urdu were two standardized form of what is actually one language in the early 19th century with Hindi being identified with the Devanagari script while Urdu was identified with the Perso-Arabic script. Devanagari script was originally used to write Sanskrit. It was only later that Hindi and Urdu began to be treated as separate languages.

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