Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period in the eighth century, and it became Early Middle Japanese in the Heian period that followed. It is an early member of the Japonic language family, with no genetic link to any other family proven. Most of the surviving corpus is poetry, above all the Man'yoshu, together with a smaller number of formal prose works, all written in man'yogana, a system that uses Chinese characters as syllabograms or, occasionally, logograms. The language is primarily agglutinative, with subject-object-verb word order. In this atlas the entry names the language of the earliest Japanese texts, kept separate from the Classical Japanese entry.
Facts
Liturgical role (class) Connections
Attested in Region
Japan, Regions The language of the Nara period in Japan.
Source Old Japanese (Wikipedia)
Language Of
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Named or Composed in This Language
Source Man'yogana (Wikipedia)
Uses This Script
The Old Japanese corpus was written in man'yogana.
Source Old Japanese (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Old Japanese (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationOld Japanese, lead paragraph
is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century).
Old Japanese, corpus
The most important are the 27 Norito ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927)
Old Japanese, corpus, liturgical role
The most important are the 27 Norito ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927)
Attested in Region: Japan, Old Japanese, sources and dating
Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period (710-794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara).
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