Japanese

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.

Modern Japanese is the everyday working language of both Shinto and Buddhist religious life in Japan today, including contemporary shrine and temple signage, popular devotional publishing, and the sermons and pastoral writing of Buddhist priests across the country's major schools, even where specific ritual chants and sutras retain the older Sino-Japanese or Classical Japanese pronunciations inherited from their original transmission.

Modern Japanese has also become the primary language of Japan's numerous postwar new religious movements, including Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization whose extensive modern Japanese devotional and doctrinal literature has since been translated into dozens of other languages for its international membership, and of Shinto's own modern popular publishing, including guidebooks and prayer manuals sold at shrines nationwide.

Japanese Christian communities, a small minority within Japan, likewise use modern Japanese for worship and scripture, including multiple modern Japanese Bible translations produced across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by both Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts working to render Christian scripture into a language whose vocabulary of transcendence and divinity had developed along quite different lines from the biblical original.