Japanese belongs to the Fuyu language family (Japan-Koguryo language family), with 654.38+25 million native speakers, and Japanese speakers account for 1.6% of the world population.

The origin of Japanese has always been a controversial issue. Japanese in Meiji era classified Japanese as Altaic language family, but this view of Altaic language family has been generally denied. Homer Hubert and Xiao Ye King (? No Susumu) thinks that Japanese belongs to the Dravidian language family, Nishida Daxiong thinks that Japanese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, Christopher I. Beckwith thinks that Japanese belongs to the Japanese-Koguryo language family, and Leon Angelo serafim thinks that Japanese and Ryukyu can form the Japanese language family. There is a hypothesis that Austronesian languages, Zhuang-Dong languages and Japanese languages can form Austronesian languages, that is, they are all homologous.