Nihongo wa Doko Kara Kimashita ka---Where Did the Japanese Language Come From?

Japanese is one of the most spoken languages in the world, having over 126 million fluent speakers in Japan and over 2 million others outside of the country.
No one really knows where the spoken language came from though many scholars have tried making educated guesses. Some places have been linked to the language such as the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean. Other sources are beleived to be Polynesian and Chinese. Here we can see Japan and Korea.

The Ural-Altaic family is the most widely accepted link among scholars, and within this family it is Korean that has been linked the most. With sentence structure, vowel pronunciation, and grammar being identical, this language has the most potential for being the language’s root. Another similarity is the use of honorifics. This is the use of hierarchies is the language; such as “san” is put at the end of someone’s name for respect, Korea also has their equivalence such as “oppa”. Even though this seems exciting, the pronunciation of words is completely different and mostly incomparable. Here are the consonats and vowels in Korean.