I’m a freshman in college and today we had an Icebreakers challenge were we each had to describe a country we wanted to visit with three facts and the rest of the class had to guess what country the person was talking about. I chose Japan. Now, the guy next to me is a complete know it all when it comes to Japan, is planning to major in Asian international relations with a focus in Japan, and even knows how to speak Japanese as a second language, so I was a bit nervous. When it was my turn I had listed out my first two facts just fine, but when I got to my third fact, he got offended and had to interrupt me in front of everyone. I had said that the language spoken in my country was an “Isolated Language” and he passionately tried to correct me by telling me that I was wrong and that they were related. I told him that they are only similar in the writing system they use because one of three writing systems that Japanese uses, Kanji, is derived from the Chinese alphabet. Despite this, he still insisted I was wrong. I then said that they are in completely different language families that are not related to eachother at all, but he still wouldn’t budge. Here is the worst part, our lecturer who studied Japanese jumped in confirming the claim that Japanes and Chinese are infact “related” languages despite me just stating that they are in completely unrelated language families. After that I was forced to end my turn for the next person participate in the Ice Breakers. Needless to say I am dumbfounded. How can two people who are credited in knowing Japanese, say that the language is related to Chinese? I have always learned that Japanese is an isolated language. Am I wrong, are they actually related?
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I would imagine there are sources to support both sides of the argument. It may ultimately depend on precise definitions of “isolated”, “related”, “language”, “language family”, et c
This reads like you missed a few sentences at the beginning since you just start talking about how Japanese isn’t related to another language but only say that you mean Chinese halfway through the post
Linguistically Japanese is neither a language isolate (because it has some minor relatives in the [Ryuukyuuan languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_languages)), nor is it related to Chinese in the linguistic sense, just like English isn’t related to French or Latin even though (afaik) about half of all English words are of Latin and/or French origin [edit: For some reason I forgot that they’re all Indo-European but the point still stands since English is in a different sub-family]
Also use some paragraphs, reading a wall of text like that is annoying
You didn’t mention Chinese until later so I was confused.
Japanese borrowed writing from China and they used (classical) Chinese as a prestige language for centuries.
Japanese might be related to Korean in the opinion of some linguists, but I don’t know if there is a definitive consensus.
Japanese is not related to Chinese, linguistically speaking.
Japanese is also not an isolate language, as it’s related to Ryukyuan languages, and falls under the family of Japonic languages.
both of you are wrong and the whole spectacle sounds like a demolition derby of ignorance. At best i could say you are less wrong, but I would be guilty of damning you with faint praise.
Geez. If this was the icebreaker session, I shudder to think what the actual classes will be like 😅
Japanese uses Chinese as writing system and pronunciation system (Onyomi). So people who are literate in Chinese can actually understand some words if they ever go to Japan.
Japanese and Korean also share similar grammar structures and some common vocabularies.
So I don’t know if your definition if ‘isolated’ is different, but the Japanese language has influences from the other countries surrounding it.
Just to clarify for anyone reading, since I have had similar doubts about Japan’s language isolate status.
In linguistics, two languages are considered part of the same language family if there’s evidence of a shared proto language that they both evolved from. Having similar language features (writing systems, vocabulary, or even grammar) is not necessarily evidence of a shared proto-language. So even though Japanese shares a writing system with Chinese and has very similar grammar to Korean, the three languages are not considered to be part of the same language family because there’s not evidence of a single proto-language from which they all evolved.
A language isolate is a language that doesn’t have any other languages in it’s language family (ie it doesn’t share a proto-language with anyone). So when people say that Japanese is a language isolate, they mean that it has a unique proto-language, not that it’s never been influenced by or borrowed features from another language. It’s kind of like, if you’re an only child and you get the same hair cut as your best friend, you’re still an only child. You and your friend didn’t magically become related because you now look similar.
I hadn’t heard previosly of Japanese and Ryuukyuuan being related (I’m not a linguist. I just Googled once), but I’d believe it. In that case the whole “Japanese is a language isolate” thing likely just persists because people forget about indigenous minority languages.
Was this for a Japanese language class?
Yeah, you’re wrong, sorry. Look at even just the numbers if you need to prove it to yourself. Chinese and Japanese history are hugely related. Chinese (straight up) was used in official situations for many many centuries. Even in modern day, sounds are frequently taken from the Chinese reading (onyomi). To say they’re unrelated is baffling. I can only speak for Mandarin, but there are words or part of words that are very audibly similar (though less so than on paper).
Sounds like you need to do revaluate your sources. Or perhaps you misunderstood some information? Maybe you got mixed up with the fact that Japanese is only really spoken in Japan itself (as opposed to, say, English or Spanish).
Edit to clarify: it sounds from the op that this isn’t a complex linguistics discussion. In terms of ‘related at all’, to me that implies any kind of influence whatsoever. This doesn’t sound to me as though the disagreement is about the technical niches of grammar structure.