Geographic Distribution

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan and parts of China, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese and were each given a Japanese name. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in the United States (notably California and Hawaii), and Brazil also frequently speak Japanese. Their descendants (known as nisei or second generation), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well, though many of them will never attain any degree of fluency.

Official status
Japanese is the only official language of Japan, and Japan is the only country to have Japanese as an official language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyojungo or standard Japanese, and kyotsugo or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japan many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyojungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.

Because it is Japan's only official language and there are few foreign Japanese speakers, the language is heavily tied to Japanese culture and vice-versa. There are many Japanese words describing certain Japanese cultural ideas, traditions, and customs (e.g., wa, nemawashi, kaizen, seppuku), which do not have corresponding words in other languages. Understanding the Japanese language requires knowledge of Japanese society.

Dialects
There are dozens of dialects spoken in Japan. Among them are Kansai-ben, Tsugaru-ben, and Kanto-ben (Tokyo and surrounding areas). Dialects are generally mutually intelligible, although extremely geographically separated dialects such as the Tohoku and Kyushu variants are not. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage, vocabulary and in some cases pronunciation.

The Ryukyuan languages used in and around Okinawa are related to Japanese, but the two are mutually unintelligible. Due to the close relationship they are still sometimes considered only dialects of Japanese.