Japanese
Japanese Kana is used primarily to write the Japanese language. Also used for Ainu, Okinawan languages, and Taiwanese Hokkien. Katakana and hiragana are parallel scripts, broadly representing the same set of Japanese syllables, formed from combining vowel and consonant phonemes, or vowel phonemes or n in isolation. Nearly every letter has an exact counterpart in the other script. Diacritics are used to represent phonetic contrasts, and there is a set of digraphs formed with smaller letterforms. Other letters exist for certain archaic and non-Japanese language syllables. Spacing is normally absent, and full-width punctuation markers are used. Hiragana emerged as simplifications of cursive Chinese characters based on their man'yōgana readings, whereas katakana were adapted from individual character elements. In many cases, both the hiragana and katakana letters for the same syllable derive from the same original Chinese character, such as て and テ (te) from 天 (ten). Japanese language text generally features katakana, hiragana and Chinese characters (Kanji) used in tandem, the choice of script fulfilling different grammatical and sociolinguistic purposes. For example, while most verb stems are written using Chinese characters, inflectional endings are written with hiragana. Katakana is generally used with Western-language loanwords.
Script Classification | Syllabary |
Letter Case | None |
Commonly Used Quotation Marks | 「...」,『...』〝, ... 〟, “...” |
Numerals | 0–9: Hindu-Arabic numerals used |
Earliest Recorded Usage | 10th century CE |
Used to Write | Japanese, Ainu, Okinawan languages, Taiwanese Hokkien. |
Added to Unicode | Version 1.0 (1991) [Both katakana and hiragana] |