What is the origin of Japanic languages? For over a century, the Altaic hypothesis, now about to fall apart, has been stating that Japanese and Korean were distant descendents of a common language, also at the origin of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages. Since then, many other hypothesis have appeared, some of them quite original: Austronesian, mixture of Altaic and Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian, Indo-European, Eurasian… No wonder the subject is so controversial!

In Japan, two main theories are opposed:

– the first one, deeply rooted in the national imagination, places the origins of the Japanese language back to the hunter-gatherers from the Jomon culture, who populated the archipelago during the Palaeolithic period, between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago.

– the second one puts forward the cultural and linguistic influence of the Yayoi culture,  which appeared much later, coming from the Korean peninsula around 200 BC.

Two researchers from the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegama, wanted to settle the question by using phylogeny. This biology technique designed to reconstruct the evolution of species has been applied to the evolution of languages for a dozen years now. In fact, we mentioned it last April relative to New Zealand evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson who claimed that all languages originated in Africa by using this method.

Based on the (controversial) principle that “languages have gene-like properties and they also evolve by a process of descent”, Mr Lee and Mr Hasegama drew a list of 210 basic words in 59 Japanic dialects and languages. Then they analysed their evolution using computer based models and the results have shown that all languages would descend from a unique language, which used to be spoken approximately 2,200 years ago or… at the time of the Yayoi people.

If this argument between linguists may seem quite obscure for non-specialists, political interests are really at stake beyond linguistic facts: indeed, the link to the Yayoi culture had been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II, whereas the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized after the war…

Read the New York Times article

Read the AFP article (in French)

To review the connection between Japanese and Korean, here is an article by Anton Antonov (2008), teacher and researcher at the INALCO (Paris): Le japonais et le coréen : une famille impossible ? (in French)