Japanese is regarded linguistically as an independent language. It has many similarities with the Altaic group of languages but has few words in common even with Korean, which is very similar grammatically, and there is no proof regarding its origins. It has many basic similarities with the languages of South-East Asia, and it used to be claimed that its parent language was Lepcha, a language from the foothills of the Himalayas. Recently, some scholars have been emphasizing its likeness to Tamil. It appears that all we can say about Japanese is that it has been formed by a fusion of a variety of cultures over the past two thousand years.

The greatest historically-recorded influence on the Japanese Language was the introduction of the Chinese writing system and Chinese culture in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. This influence on both the written and the spoken language has continued right up to the present day, since the modern language still uses Chinese characters together with the two syllabaries hiragana and katakana, introduced in the eighth and ninth centuries and each containing forty six symbols made by abbreviating various Chinese characters. Recently, the language has become Western-influence with the introduction of Romanization. However, the Japanese sound system is far simpler than the extremely complex sound system of Chinese. Japanese has only five vowel sounds A,I, U,E and O, used on their own or with consonants to form simple syllables. The number of syllables is limited, and all end in a vowel sound except those ending with “n”, the only consonant used independently.

Sentences are usually written with a combination of Chinese characters and the hiragana syllabary, but statutes and certain other documents are written using katakana instead of hiragana. Place names and other proper nouns from the U.S.A, Europe and other areas which do not use Chinese characters, together with imported technical terms, are usually written in katakana. Approximately three thousand Chinese characters are used, but only one thousand nine hundred and forty-five, officially designated as Common-Use Characters, are used frequently.