Japanese-Speaking Countries: One Nation and One Pacific Island State

Japan is the only country where Japanese is the national language, and the only other place it holds any official status is Angaur, one of the sixteen states of Palau, where it is co-official with English and Palauan. Around 123 million people speak it, almost all of them in Japan, which makes Japanese one of the largest languages in the world with essentially no international footprint. Japan also has no law naming Japanese as its official language — the status is entirely de facto.

A Top-Twenty Language Spoken in One Place

Japanese sits around thirteenth in the world by number of speakers, ahead of German, Korean, French as a native language and Italian. Every other language in that range is spoken across multiple countries; Japanese is not.

The reason is that Japan never built a settler empire and lost the territorial one it had. Japanese was imposed on Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Micronesia, Sakhalin and parts of Southeast Asia between 1895 and 1945, and was removed from all of them within a few years of the surrender.

What remains is a small elderly cohort in Taiwan, South Korea and the Pacific islands who were educated in Japanese, and a handful of loanwords in those languages. Taiwanese Hokkien retains several hundred, and Palauan borrowed heavily enough that daijoubu and denki are ordinary Palauan words.

Angaur, the Only Foreign Jurisdiction

Angaur is a Palauan island of about a hundred people. Its state constitution names Japanese as an official language alongside Palauan and English, a legacy of the Japanese phosphate mining operation that ran there under the South Seas Mandate.

In practice essentially nobody on Angaur speaks Japanese today. The provision is a historical artefact, and it appears in reference works largely because it is the only entry in the column.

Palau as a whole retains stronger Japanese traces than the rest of Micronesia — in vocabulary, in surnames, and in the fact that a former Palauan president was of Japanese descent — but the national official languages are Palauan and English.

Where Japanese Is Spoken Abroad

Brazil has the largest Japanese-descended population outside Japan, usually put at around two million, concentrated in São Paulo. Emigration began in 1908 with the ship Kasato Maru and continued into the 1970s, and the Liberdade district of São Paulo is the largest Japanese quarter anywhere outside the country.

The language has not survived as well as the community. Third- and fourth-generation Nikkei in Brazil are largely Portuguese-speaking, and the flow reversed in the 1990s when Japan created a visa category for people of Japanese descent — several hundred thousand Brazilians moved to Japan for factory work, producing Portuguese-speaking neighbourhoods in Aichi and Shizuoka prefectures.

The United States has the next largest population, in Hawaii and California, with similar language attrition. Peru's Nikkei community produced a president. Australia, Canada, the Philippines and Thailand all have substantial expatriate communities that are Japanese-speaking but not permanent.

Three Writing Systems at Once

Japanese is written with three scripts used simultaneously in the same sentence, plus Latin letters where convenient. Kanji are Chinese characters used for content words; hiragana is a syllabary for grammatical endings and native words; katakana is a parallel syllabary for foreign borrowings, emphasis and onomatopoeia.

The Japanese government's jōyō kanji list of characters for general use contains 2,136 entries, learned across twelve years of schooling. Newspapers stay largely within it; specialist and literary texts do not, and the total number of characters in the largest dictionaries runs to tens of thousands.

Each kanji typically has at least two readings — an on reading derived from Chinese and a kun reading from native Japanese — and which one applies depends on the compound. The character for person is read hito alone and jin or nin in compounds, which is why place names and personal names are frequently unreadable even to native speakers.

Not Related to Chinese

Japanese borrowed its writing system from China and a large share of its vocabulary, and it is not related to Chinese. The grammars are entirely different: Japanese is agglutinative with subject-object-verb order, extensive verb inflection and no tones; Chinese is analytic with subject-verb-object order, no inflection and tones.

Around 60% of Japanese dictionary entries are Sino-Japanese vocabulary, comparable to the Latin and French share of English. The relationship is one of massive borrowing, exactly as English took from Latin without becoming a Romance language.

Japanese's only clearly demonstrated relatives are the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa and the surrounding islands, which are separate languages rather than dialects and are all endangered. Together they form the Japonic family, which has no proven connection to anything else.

The Politeness System Is Grammar

Japanese encodes social relationship in the verb. Keigo, honorific language, has three broad registers — polite, respectful and humble — and choosing among them is obligatory rather than stylistic. The same statement takes a different verb form depending on who is speaking to whom.

This extends well beyond verb endings. Different words exist for the same act depending on relative status: to eat is taberu, meshiagaru when the person eating is to be elevated, itadaku when the speaker is humbling themselves. Company training programmes for new graduates spend substantial time on it.

For learners this is the hardest part of the language and the part machine translation handles worst, because the correct form depends on information that is nowhere in the sentence.

Japan Has No Official Language Law

Nothing in Japanese law designates Japanese as the official language of Japan. The constitution is silent on it, and the closest thing to a statutory basis is the Court Act of 1947, which requires that court proceedings be conducted in Japanese.

This is not unusual — the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia are in the same position — but it is striking in a country with a strong national identity built partly on linguistic homogeneity. Proposals to add a clause have been raised periodically and have gone nowhere.

The practical consequence appears at the margins. Ainu, the language of Hokkaido's indigenous people, received formal recognition only in 2019 under a law acknowledging the Ainu as an indigenous people, and has a handful of fluent speakers left. The Ryukyuan languages have no legal protection at all and are all listed as endangered by UNESCO.

How Many People Are Learning It

The Japan Foundation's survey counts around four million learners of Japanese worldwide, in some 140 countries. That is far below the numbers studying English, Spanish or French, and roughly comparable to Italian.

The geography is lopsided. China, Indonesia, South Korea, Australia and Vietnam account for the large majority, and Indonesia's numbers are driven almost entirely by its inclusion in the secondary school curriculum. Australia teaches more Japanese per head than any other country.

The stated motivation has shifted. Where learners in the 1980s cited business and the Japanese economy, surveys now put interest in manga, anime, games and popular culture at or near the top — one of the clearest cases anywhere of entertainment driving language study.

Dialects, and the Kansai Exception

Standard Japanese is based on the speech of educated Tokyo and was spread nationally by schooling, conscription and broadcasting from the Meiji period onward. Regional varieties remain strong, and some are barely intelligible to Tokyo speakers.

Kansai-ben, spoken in Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, is the most prominent and the only regional variety with real prestige, partly because Kansai was the political and cultural centre before Edo and partly because Japanese comedy is dominated by Osaka performers. Kansai speakers use it in national media in a way speakers of Tōhoku or Kyushu dialects generally do not.

At the extremes the differences are large. Kagoshima dialect in the far south and Tsugaru dialect in the far north have both been subtitled on national television, and the Ryukyuan languages further south are not Japanese at all.

English Loanwords, and What Happens to Them

Japanese has absorbed enormous quantities of English, written in katakana and reshaped to fit Japanese phonology, which has no consonant clusters and only one final consonant. Baseball becomes besubōru, McDonald's becomes makudonarudo, and personal computer becomes pasokon.

Many are clipped or recombined into forms English speakers would not recognise. Sumaho is a smartphone, rimokon a remote control, konbini a convenience store. Others, called wasei-eigo, are English-derived coinages that do not exist in English at all — salaryman, skinship, consent for an electrical outlet.

Traffic in the other direction is smaller but growing: tsunami, karaoke, emoji, sushi, futon, tycoon, honcho, karate, manga and anime are all Japanese, and emoji is not derived from emotion but from e, picture, and moji, character.

One of the Hardest Languages for English Speakers

The US Foreign Service Institute puts Japanese in Category IV, its hardest band, at roughly 2,200 class hours — and adds a note that Japanese is usually more difficult than the other languages in that group, which include Mandarin, Arabic and Korean.

The pronunciation is not the problem. Japanese has five vowels, a small consonant inventory, no tones and a mora-timed rhythm that most learners manage quickly. The difficulty is the writing system, the honorific register, and a grammar that shares almost nothing with English.

Japan's own effort to teach English has famously struggled, and the country ranks low in international English proficiency indices despite decades of compulsory instruction — the mirror image of the same structural distance. For how the region's other one-country languages compare, see Korean across two states and the count of countries in Asia.