What is the history of the Japanese Language?

The history of Japanese language conventionally starts in the 8^th century, the date of the first written evidence. The most ancient texts of Japan are the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and the Man’yōshū. The first records are written in Classical Chinese, but soon a new system was developed, the Man’yōgana, that used Chinese characters both for their phonetic and semantic value. This system was quite complicated.  Old Japanese evolved into Middle Japanese, which covers the years from 794 to 1600. By this period the Japanese had designed their own writing system and did away with the Chinese one. Soon thereafter, Buddhist priests developed a simplified phonetic system for writing shorthand, the foundation for the present-day katakana phonetic script. In the 8th century, women of the Heian Court in Kyoto developed the second phonetic script of Japanese, hiragana, in order to write poetry, novels, and diaries. Today, both of these phonetic scripts are still used in a modernized form, along with Chinese characters, or kanji, to render written Japanese. Western cultures are having a large impact on modern day Japanese and this is expected to continue. Also noteworthy is the difference between how the generations speak. Younger Japanese people are coming to prefer a more informal way of communicating and are choosing to ignore the importance of the role of honorific and gender-specific speech regarded important in traditional Japanese.

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