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Japanese is tentatively ascribed to the Altaic language family (named after the Alti Mountains, in Central Asia), however many linguists consider the divergence between Japanese and other languages of the Asian mainland to be too significant to include Japanese in a widely defined linguistic family. Despite the dominant influence of Chinese on Japanese writing and vocabulary, the differences between the two languages is such that they are not even considered to be in the same language family.
The original people migrated west towards Turkey and east towards Korea and Japan. Turkish, Korean, Mongolian and Uzbek are other languages belonging to the Altaic family. Altaic languages have many suffixes which can be ‘glued’ on to one another to build up complex phrases. ‘Agglutinating‘ (from Latin "to glue together") is a word used to describe the linguistic characteristic where word stems and suffixes do not change form, when joined with others. Japanese is the largest 'agglutinative language’; the other main agglutinative languages are Hungarian, Finnish and Korean
The two Japonic languages are: Japanese and Ryukyuan. The Ryukyu or Nansei "southwest" island chain stretches south-westward from the Japanese mainland towards Taiwan. Ryukyuan is still commonly called a ‘dialect’, even though it differs more from Japanese in vocabulary and grammar than does English and German. Sadly, a significant percentage of the 1 million remaining Ryukyuan native speakers are centenarians.
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