Japan , Hawaii, Brazil, Guam, Marshall Islands, Palau and Taiwan.

Through painstaking research, there is conclusive evidence for the genetic relationships of the major languages of the world. English, along with a host of languages spoken in Europe, Russia, and India, belong to the Indo-European family of languages. In contrast, there is no conclusive evidence relating Japanese to a single family of languages. The most prominent hypothesis places Japanese in the Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Tungusic, Mongolian, and Korean, with the closest relationship to Korean. According to Roy Andrew Miller, the original Altaic language was spoken in the Transcaspian steppe country, and the speakers of this language undertook massive migrations before 2,000 B.C., spreading this language family from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with some major features of Japanese, leading some scholars to turn to the languages of the South Pacific in the Austronesian family for clues of genetic relationship. A hypothesis that has currency among a number of Japanese historical linguists is a "hybrid" theory that accepts the relationship to the Altaic family, but also hypothesizes influence from Austronesian languages possibly through heavy lexical borrowing. It is also important to note that in the northern island of Hokkaido, the Ainu people, who are physically and culturally different from the rest of the Japanese, speak a language that has even more successfully escaped attempts to relate it to a single language family.

With the introduction of the writing system from China starting about 1,500 years ago, the Japanese people began to extensively record their language through poetry and prose. The language of that era, called Old Japanese, had a number of features that have been lost through time. For example, Susumu Ono has argued that Old Japanese had eight vowels instead of the five that we see today. There were also a number of grammatical and morphological features that no longer exist. The transition from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese took place from about the 12th century to the 16th century.

There are a large number of dialects throughout the four main islands and the smaller islands of Okinawa and others. Some dialects such as those spoken in the southern parts of Japan (Kyushu, Okinawa) are virtually incomprehensible to the speakers of other dialects, requiring the use of the standard (or "common") dialect for communication. The two dialect families with the largest number of speakers are the dialect spoken in and around Tokyo, which is equivalent to the "common" dialect, and the dialects of the Kansai region spoken in western Japan in cities such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. Due to the spread of the common dialect through television and radio, most people outside the Tokyo region speak the common dialect as well as the dialect of their area.

The Japanese alphabet is split into three (in order of complexity): Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. The words that the Japanese language borrows, simple words like "Beer", "Coffee", and "Game", are written using the Katakana alphabet, the simplest of the three. Most modern jargon in the Japanese language is simply taken from English; which means that a lot of what you see written in Japanese games is similar, if not identical, to English, albeit written in Katakana.

Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of Hiragana and Katakana, plus Kanji. Modern Japanese texts may also include Romaji (Roman letters), the standard way of writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet, eimoji (English script), non-Japanese words written in their own script and various symbols known as kigo.

• Generally written vertically beginning on the right. Some texts are written horizontally when sentences need to include English and Arabic numerals and formulae.
• English words of Japanese origin are kamikaze, kimono, and karate.