Japan does not legally recognize an official language. Rather, Japanese may be considered official by customary law. Japanese courts are the sole location that define language use: Judicial Code Article 74 states "Japanese will be used in courts".
About 99% of the population speaks Japanese as their first language. The Ryūkyūan languages, also part of the Japonic language family to which Japanese belongs, are spoken in Okinawa, but few children are learning these languages now. Ainu, the language of the indigenous minority in northern Japan, is moribund, with only a few elderly native speakers remaining in Hokkaidō. Most public and private schools require students to take courses in both Japanese and English.
The Japanese language is an agglutinative language distinguished by a system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. There is no consensus on what, if any, linguistic relationship Japanese has with other languages, but scholars continue to research the issue.
Japanese incorporates many foreign elements. Japanese has borrowed or derived large amounts of vocabulary from Chinese. When non-Chinese foreign words are written in Japanese, they are usually done so in a separate alphabet called katakana. Since the end of World War II, Japanese has also extensively borrowed from English. The writing system uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on simplified forms of Chinese characters), as well as the Roman alphabet and Hindu-Arabic numerals.
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