A short history of Japanese: from the Kojiki to kana and kanji

Japanese has written records going back to the 8th century, and its grammar has stayed remarkably stable ever since — a modern reader with some training can still enjoy poetry from the 700s. Seven moments shaped the language you will learn, and they explain why it uses three scripts at once. The facts come from Britannica and Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Updated November 7, 2026 · 4 min read

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1. Japonic: a small family of its own

Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages — Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni — and possibly Hachijō form the Japonic language family. Most linguists believe Japonic emerged in Japan during the Yayoi period (about 300 BCE–250 CE). Links to Korean, to the so-called Altaic languages or to Austronesian have all been proposed, and none has won wide agreement (Britannica). The map of today’s dialects is in Where is Japanese spoken?

2. Chinese writing arrives

Some Chinese words probably reached Japan in the 1st century CE or earlier, but the systematic introduction came about 400 CE, when Korean scholars brought Chinese books to Japan (Britannica). Japan had no writing of its own, so it adopted the characters — the same script whose story is told in A short history of Chinese.

3. The Kojiki and the Man’yōshū

Written records of Japanese date from the 8th century; the oldest is the Kojiki (712), whose preface is written in Chinese characters with classical Chinese grammar. Within about 50 years, by the time of the Man’yōshū — the anthology of Japanese verse compiled after 759, shown at the top of this page — scribes used the sounds of characters to write Japanese words: yama ‘mountain’ as one character read ya and one read ma. This use is called man’yō-gana (Britannica).

4. Kana: two scripts born from characters

Two syllabic scripts grew out of man’yō-gana. Katakana, angular, came from abbreviated characters; hiragana, rounded, from simplified cursive writing. Kana were taken up by women writers, and Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century Tale of Genji — considered by many Japan’s greatest literary work — is written almost entirely in hiragana (Britannica).

Kana also gave every character two readings: the Sino-Japanese on-yomi and the native kun-yomi — 山 ‘mountain’ is san in one and yama in the other (Britannica). Today kanji write content words, hiragana write particles and endings, and katakana write mostly foreign loanwords — see how they work together in Japanese grammar basics.

5. Old, Middle and Modern Japanese

The 1,200 years of written Japanese are usually split into Old Japanese (to the 8th century), Late Old Japanese (9th–11th), Middle Japanese (12th–16th), Early Modern Japanese (17th–18th) and Modern Japanese (from the 19th century). One change was the shift of p to h: Okinawan still says pi ‘fire’ and pana ‘flower’ where Tokyo says hi and hana (Britannica).

6. Words from Portugal, the Netherlands and English

Sixteenth-century Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch missionaries and traders left words still in daily use: pan ‘bread’ (Portuguese pão), tabako, tenpura (Portuguese tempero) and biiru ‘beer’ (Dutch bier). Today slightly more than 80% of Japan’s foreign loanwords come from English, and slightly more than half of all its vocabulary is Sino-Japanese (Britannica) — more reasons in Why learn Japanese?

7. One standard and a list of kanji

A standard written language came with compulsory education, which began in 1886, and the national kyōtsū-go ‘common language’ is based on the Tokyo dialect (Britannica). The government limited the kanji in common use: 1,850 characters in 1946, 1,945 in the 1981 Jōyō kanji list (Britannica), and since a cabinet notice of 30 November 2010 the list has 2,136 characters (Agency for Cultural Affairs). They are best learned in small daily steps — 16 words a day.

Keep learning

• Why learn Japanese? 7 reasons
• Where is Japanese spoken? — dialects and the Ryukyuan languages on a map
• Japanese grammar basics · Japanese tenses explained
• Why learn Chinese? · Learn Chinese · Level tests · All guides · Plans