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Language code: ja

Technical information about ISO 639 language code ja

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Japanese language, designated by the ja code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

ja

Name

Official

Japanese

Native

日本語

Family
Japonic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Eastern JapaneseWestern JapaneseKyushu JapaneseHachijoHokkaido Japanese
Related languages
OkinawanAmamiMiyakoYaeyama
Key facts
Written with a mix of kanji, hiragana, and katakanaSentence order is normally subject–object–verbEmploys a pitch-accent system rather than stressHas an elaborate set of honorific and humble forms to show social relationsAdopts many modern loanwords from English, rendered in katakana
Sample phrase

こんにちは、お元気ですか？

Character encodings

Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family. It is the de facto official language of Japan. Also, it is used in some parts of Palau. Japanese is written using a mix of Kanji (Chinese characters) and Kana scripts (Hiragana and Katakana). It is estimated that there are more than 120 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

Japan

120M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Japanese speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

ja-JP – Japanese (Japan)

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