About Japanese
Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative language. It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation. The language has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system. Japanese is a mora-timed language.

Japanese is a member of the Japonic languages, which include Japanese and the languages spoken throughout the Ry?ky? Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is often called a language isolate; though this is a bit of a misnomer - linguistically, the Ryukyuan languages are distinct enough to be considered separate languages from Japanese, thus placing them all in a larger Japonic language family.

source: Wikipedia