Japonic

The Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan family has two living branches: Japanese, spoken across the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages of the Ryukyu island chain to the south.

Most scholars hold that the family was carried to northern Kyushu around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of the Yayoi culture arriving from the Korean Peninsula, and that it then spread through the archipelago, displacing the Ainu languages once widespread in northern Honshu. The split between Japanese and Ryukyuan probably predates the seventh century.

Japanese is first recorded in the seventh and eighth centuries, when scribes wrote Old Japanese with Chinese characters in works such as the Man'yōshū. The arrival of Buddhism from the sixth century and the borrowing of Chinese culture in the eighth and ninth centuries brought many Sino-Japanese words into the language.