Old Japanese
oldest attested stage of the Japanese language
Old Japanese (上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period.
Old Japanese is an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.
The bulk of the Old Japanese corpus consists of poetry, especially the Man'yōshū, with a smaller number of formal prose works. These texts were written using man'yōgana, a writing system that employs Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms. The language featured a few phonological differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.
As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese is primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb.
The public source identifies “Old Japanese” as oldest attested stage of the Japanese language. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Japanese, oldest and attested.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5736700. The Library of Congress control number is sh85069644. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old Japanese” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.