ABSTRACT
Japanese appears to be genetically related to Korean; the two languages are remarkably similar in morphology and syntactic structure. There are numerous Japanese dialects, some virtually unintelligible to speakers of the Tokyo dialect, which constitutes the modern standard. Japanese shares many morphological and syntactic features with Altaic languages such as Turkish, but also exhibits many features which, from the standpoint of the European languages, seem quite exotic, such as the various linguistic reflexes of the pervasive social and sexual stratification of Japanese society. Thus Japanese offers an interesting case study for the crosslinguistic analysis of language acquisition. Although the most common word order, and the one which appears in standard grammars, is subject-object-verb, in ordinary Japanese conversation, word order is quite flexible preceding the verb. A brief sketch of Japanese suggests, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors pervade the grammar of the language.
