Japonic · ISO 639-3 jpn · ja
Japanese Language 日本語
Japanese is a Japonic language spoken by about 128 million people in 4 countries. It is an official language of Japan. It is written in the Japanese and Latin scripts.
Where Japanese is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
About the Japanese language
Japanese (日本語) is spoken by about 128 million people, which makes it the 13th most spoken language in the world — just behind Russian (170 million) and ahead of Western Panjabi (113 million). It belongs to the Japonic language family and, more precisely, to the Japan-Taiwan Japanese group within the Japan-Taiwan Japanese branch.
Where is Japanese spoken?
Japanese is used in 4 countries. The largest communities live in Japan (117 million), Brazil (462,109), Canada (104,745) and Singapore (36,170). More than half of the population speaks it in Japan — the places where travellers will hear it everywhere.
Share of the population that speaks Japanese: Japan 95% (117 million), Brazil 0.2% (462,109), Canada 0.3% (104,745) and Singapore 0.6% (36,170).
Japanese is an official language in 1 country: Japan.
Writing system and status
Japanese is written in the Japanese and Latin scripts. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
ISO codes: ISO 639-1 ja, ISO 639-3 jpn.
Frequently asked questions about Japanese
How many people speak Japanese?
Where is Japanese spoken?
In which countries is Japanese an official language?
What language family does Japanese belong to?
What is Japanese called in Japanese?
Is Japanese an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.