There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. The following languages are listed as having 45 million or more total speakers in the 26th edition of Ethnologue published in 2023.

The official list of jōyō kanji was revised several times, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters remained largely unchanged.Passing this exam is an acceptable alternative to passing, among others, one of TestDaF, DSH or Goethe-Zertifikat C2: GDS which also meet the language proficiency requirements on foreigners who want do post-secondary education in which the language of instruction is German (N. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way many Greek- and Latin-derived words – both inherited or borrowed into European languages, or modern coinages from Greek or Latin roots – are shared among modern European languages – see classical compound.

Japanese dialectologists agree that a major dialect boundary separates Okinawan dialects of the Ryukyu Islands from the rest of the mainland dialects. Kōgo is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect. An increasingly popular theory along that line posits that the mixed nature of Japanese results from its Austronesian lexical substratum and the Altaic grammatical superstratum.

Many of these were then imported into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect). is a significant difference when you consider how difficult it is to master the recommended 2,000+ characters! With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French, and English. The later forms of Late Middle Japanese are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese phonology than for previous forms (for instance, the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam).