Japanese is spoken by 126 million people mainly in Japan but also in 26 other countries including American Samoa, Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Dominican Republic, Germany, Guam, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines and Taiwan.

Japanese has no known linguistic relatives though are possibly distantly related to the Altaic family of languages, which includes Korean, Mongolian and Turkic languages. Japanese is not related to Chinese, though it does contain a huge number of Chinese 'loan' words, in fact perhaps 50% of the words used in Japanese are of Chinese origin. Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of gairaigo: foreign words mainly from English.