Old Japanese

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.