- ISO 639
ja- Its own name
- 日本語
- Script
- CJK
- Direction
- Left to right
Japanese
Japanese (日本語) is spoken by 117.6M people across 3 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 1 of them. Japan holds 100% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Japanese covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
117.6M
Japan 100% · Brazil 0% · Canada 0%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 3 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
100.6M
0%100%
86% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
100%
0%100%
One market with a diaspora: Japan holds 100% of speakers. Take the tone and conventions from there.
Territories
3
1 where it is official nationally, 1 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$12.0T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.40×
1.0×1.6×+
About 40% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. It feeds the budget estimator.
Where Japanese is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JapanJP | 95% | 117M | 100.1M | official |
| BrazilBR | 0.3% | 462.1K | 390.3K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.3% | 104.7K | 98.8K | minority or diaspora |
CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
CJK
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
1
No grammatical plural agreement, so counted messages need one arm.
Rate index
1.40×
Prices about 40% above a mainstream pair.
Engineering note. Mixed Kanji + Kana. Vertical text optional.