History and Classification

Historical linguists do not all agree about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several competing theories:

· Japanese is a relative of the Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Mongolian, and Turkish. Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that like Finnish, Estonian, Turkish, and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language, with two (phonologically distinctive) tones, similar to Serbian/Croatian and Swedish. This tonal system is often referred to as a pitch accent in linguistics. Additionally, there are a suggestive number of apparently regular correspondences in basic vocabulary, such as ishi "stone" to Turkic das, yottsu "four" to Turkic dört.

· Japanese is a relative of other Asian languages. This theory maintains that Japanese split from - or had large influences from - other East Asian languages such as Korean (and possibly the Sino-Tibetan languages). Phonological and lexical similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages have been noted.

· Japanese is related to southern Asian languages. Some researchers have suggested a possible relationship between Japanese and Tamil, a member of the Dravidian language family spoken in southern India.

· Japanese is a kind of creole, with an Altaic grammatical substructure, and core Austronesian vocabulary.

· Japanese is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language except other Japonic languages (notably Okinawan).