Japanese writing system in the context of "Southern Ryukyuan languages"

Kanji (/ˈkændʒi, ˈkɑːn-/; Japanese: 漢字, pronounced [kaɲ.dʑi] ,'Chinese characters') are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese. They comprised a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the general public. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.

The term kanji in Japanese literally means "Han characters". Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi (traditional Chinese: 漢字; simplified Chinese: 汉字; pinyin: hànzì; lit. 'Han characters') share a common foundation. The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century AD and has since had a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history, and records. Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters.

Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな; IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji (Chinese characters).

It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji).

Katakana (片仮名, カタカナ; IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).

The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (katakana カ); or "n" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician.

Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese characters, Korean hangul, and Japanese kana may be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from top-to-bottom, and even vertically from bottom-to-top.

Traditionally, written Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese are written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the left of the preceding one. The stroke order and stroke direction of Chinese characters, Vietnamese chữ Nôm, Korean hangul, and kana all facilitate writing in this manner. In addition, writing in vertical columns from right to left facilitated writing with a brush in the right hand while continually unrolling the sheet of paper or scroll with the left. Since the nineteenth century, it has become increasingly common for these languages to be written horizontally, from left to right, with successive rows going from top to bottom, under the influence of European languages such as English, although vertical writing is still frequently used in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macau, and Taiwan.

Japanese calligraphy (書道, Shodō), also called Shūji (習字), is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language. Written Japanese was originally based on Chinese characters only, but the advent of the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries resulted in intrinsically Japanese calligraphy styles.

An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse operations) that are available to them. Using an input method is usually necessary for languages that have more graphemes than there are keys on the keyboard.

For instance, on the computer, this allows the user of Latin keyboards to input Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indic characters. On hand-held devices, it enables the user to type on the numeric keypad to enter Latin alphabet characters (or any other alphabet characters) or touch a screen display to input text. On some operating systems, an input method is also used to define the behavior of the dead keys.

East Asian typography is the application of typography to the writing systems used for the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages. Scripts represented in East Asian typography include Chinese characters, kana, and hangul.

The Song script (simplified Chinese: 宋体; traditional Chinese: 宋體) or Ming script (simplified Chinese: 明体; traditional Chinese: 明體) is a category of serifed typefaces used to display Chinese family of scripts such as traditional and simplified Chinese characters as well as their borrowed (e.g. Japanese kanji and Korean hanja) and radical-derived relatives (e.g. katagana). First invented during the Song dynasty and matured during the Ming dynasty, they are currently the most common printing and text display/editing fonts for Chinese and Japanese language publications.

The former term "Song" is the official terminology used in Mainland China, while the latter "Ming" is used prominently in Taiwan and Hong Kong and is a loanword from post-restoration Japan, as the typefaces are commonly called Mincho tai (Hiragana： みんちょうたい) and Myeongjo che (Hangul: 명조체) — both literally translate to "Ming dynasty font" — respectively in Japanese and Korean texts.