Japan has a population of over 120 million, and linguistically, it is a nearly homogenous nation, with more than 99% of the population using the same language. This means that the Japanese language is the sixth most spoken language in the world. However, the language is spoken in scarcely any region outside Japan.

There are many theories about the origin of the Japanese language. A number of scholars believe that syntactically it is close to such Altaic languages as Turkish and Mongolian, and its syntactic similarity to Korean is widely acknowledged. There is also evidence that its morphology and vocabulary were influenced prehistorically by the Malayo-Polynesian languages to the south.

The Japanese writing system comes from Chinese, although the languages spoken by the Japanese and Chinese are completely different. After Chinese writing was introduced sometime in the fifth or sixth century, it was supplemented by 2 phonetic scripts that were transformed from the Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana.

A large number of local dialects are still used. Whereas standard Japanese, which is based on the speech of Tokyo, has been gradually spreading throughout the country under the influence of media such as radio, television and movies, the dialects spoken by the people of Kyoto and Osaka, in particular, continue to flourish and maintain their prestige.