World Language Map

Where is Japanese spoken?

Japanese (日本語) is a Japonic language, spoken in Japan, Brazil and Canada. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Japanese is spoken

Japanese is spoken in 3 countries: Japan, Brazil and Canada. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Japan95%117,041,900
Brazil0.2%462,109
Canada0.3%104,746

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Japanese is drawn as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643489), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Japanese.

How many people speak Japanese?

Wikidata gives about 128 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Japanese sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Japanese as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Japonic
  2. Japanesic
  3. Japan-Taiwan Japanese
  4. Japanese

Related languages

Other languages in the Japan-Taiwan Japanese group:

More about Japanese

Codes: ISO 639-3 jpn, Glottolog nucl1643. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Japanese

Where is Japanese spoken?

Japanese is spoken in Japan, Brazil and Canada. Unicode CLDR puts it at 95% of the population of Japan, which is about 117,041,900 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia).

How many people speak Japanese?

Wikidata gives about 128 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Japanese in?

Glottolog places Japanese in the Japonic family, in the branch Japanesic and Japan-Taiwan Japanese.

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