Koreanic languagesKoreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin suggests that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished. Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters are much more difficult to interpret.
Nagoya([na̠ɡo̞ja̠]) naꜜɡoja) is the largest city in the Chūbu region, the fourth-most populous city and third most populous urban area in Japan, with a population of 2.3 million in 2020. It is one of the three major cities of Japan (Tokyo-Osaka-Nagoya). Located on the Pacific coast in central Honshu, it is the capital and the most populous city of Aichi Prefecture, and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Chiba.
Language isolateA language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with another language. Basque in Europe, Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi in Australia are all examples of language isolates. The exact number of language isolates is yet unknown due to insufficient data on several languages. One explanation for the existence of language isolates is that they might be the last remaining branch of a larger language family.
Japanese peopleare an East Asian ethnic group native to the Japanese archipelago. Japanese people constitute 97.6% of the population of the country of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 126 million people are of Japanese descent, making them one of the largest ethnic groups. Approximately 122.0 million Japanese people are residents of Japan, and there are approximately 4 million members of the Japanese diaspora, known as 日系人.
InflectionIn linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
Stratum (linguistics)In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or superstrate is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum languages influence each other, but in different ways. An adstratum or adstrate is a language that is in contact with another language in a neighbor population without having identifiably higher or lower prestige.
Morphosyntactic alignmentIn linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all.
Subject–object–verb word orderIn linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam beer drank" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam drank beer" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.
Japanese phonologyThe phonology of Japanese features about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of /a, e, i, o, u/, and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described as having a mora as the unit of timing, with each mora taking up about the same length of time, so that the disyllabic [ɲip.poɴ] ("Japan") may be analyzed as /niQpoN/ and dissected into four moras, /ni/, /Q/, /po/, and /N/.
Austronesian languagesThe Austronesian languages (ˌɔːstrəˈniːʒən) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Malay Peninsula, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). There are also a number of speakers in continental Asia. They are spoken by about 386 million people (4.9% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers.
