Modern Japanese, sometimes classified as the principal member of the small Japonic language family alongside the endangered Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa, has no firmly established wider genetic relationship to other major language families, a classification debate that has produced proposed but unproven links to Korean and to the broader Altaic hypothesis without scholarly consensus. Japanese employs a famously complex writing system combining kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese and adapted to represent Japanese words and concepts, with two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana, developed domestically from simplified kanji forms during the Heian period around the ninth and tenth centuries, a hybrid system distinguishing it from Classical Japanese, the older literary register covered separately elsewhere in this atlas.
Modern Japanese underwent significant standardization from the Meiji era onward, spreading the Tokyo dialect as the national standard through mass education, and postwar language reform simplified some kanji forms and their usage, producing the modern written standard used across contemporary Japanese religious, administrative and popular publishing today. The Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa, close relatives within the Japonic family, were themselves subject to suppression under Meiji-era and wartime Japanese assimilation policy, and today survive as endangered languages alongside a distinct Okinawan indigenous religious tradition, centered on female yuta ritual specialists, that remains less studied and less institutionally supported than mainland Shinto and Buddhism.