Japanese (jăpˌənēzˈ) [key], language of uncertain origin that is
spoken by more than 125 million people, most of whom live in
Japan. There are also many speakers of Japanese in the Ryukyu
Islands, Korea, Taiwan, parts of the United States, and Brazil.
Japanese appears to be unrelated to any other language; however,
some scholars see a kinship with the Korean tongue because the
grammars of the two are very similar. Some linguists also link
both Japanese and Korean to the Altaic languages. Japanese
exhibits a degree of agglutination. In an agglutinative
language, different linguistic elements, each of which exists
separately and has a fixed meaning, are often joined to form one
word. Japanese lacks tones, but has a musical accent and usually
stresses all syllables equally. There is no declension for nouns
and pronouns, whose grammatical relationships are shown by
particles that follow them. Verbs are inflected and generally
are placed at the end of a sentence. Extensive use of honorific
forms is especially char