東京外国語大学言語モジュール

Japanese

にほんご

The Distribution and Number of the Speakers of Japanese

Japanese is spoken by approximately 126 million people within Japan. This includes some 800 thousand people whose mother tongues are languages other than Japanese, such as Korean and Chinese. Externally, Japanese is spoken by Japanese descendants in Hawaii, North and South Americas, as well as the people in Taiwan, Korea and Micronesia, who were educated in Japanese during the Japanese occupancy in the former half of the 20th century.

The Japanese we learn here

Our module deals with the Japanese spoken in Metropolitan Tokyo and its outskirts. This is regarded as the standard form, which is used by the media such as the television and the radio, as well as in schools as the language of instruction and research, and thereby is in common use throughout Japan. This standard form has been the target of study as the language system of Japanese.