Japanese

Native Speakers: 126 Million

Japanese has dozens of dialects that are completely unintelligible to each other. They have three types of dialects which include Tokyo, Kyoto-Osaka, and Kyushu. Each of these dialects has many sub-dialects. Moreover, Ryukyuan is a dialect spoken in Okinawa and Amami Islands. Japanese boasts two distinct writing systems, hiragana and katakana, as well as making extensive use of Chinese Kanji characters.

Japanese is one of the most geographically concentrated languages on this list of the most spoken languages in the world because nearly all of the world’s native Japanese speakers live in Japan. Beyond Japan, there are also large groups of native Japanese speakers in the US, Philippines, and Brazil.

A few facts about the Japanese language:

• Japanese uses three writing systems side-by-side--hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
• Japanese has a lot of unique onomatopoeic expressions.