Sino-Japanese vocabulary

Sino-Japanese vocabulary or kango (Japanese: ^?, "Han words") refers to that portion of the Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or has been created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as kango (漢語), meaning 'Chinese words'. Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in a modern Japanese dictionary are kango, and they comprise about 18% of words used in speech.

Kango, the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from kanbun, which is actual Chinese written by Japanese in Japan. Both kango in modern Japanese and classical kanbun have Sino-xenic linguistic and phonetic elements also found in Korean and Vietnamese: that is, they are "Sino-foreign," not purely Chinese.

China's large territory and advanced culture led Chinese to exert an enormous influence on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other East Asian languages throughout history, in a manner somewhat similar the preeminent position that Greek and Latin had in European history. For example, the Middle Chinese word for gunpowder, 火藥 /xwa˧˥jak/, is rendered as hwayak in Korean, and as kayaku in Japanese. At the time of their first contact, the Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them. Chinese became the language of science, learning and religion. The earliest written language to be used in Japan was literary Chinese, which has come to be called kanbun in this context. The kanbun writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese; this Sino-Japanese vocabulary is still an important component of the Japanese language, and may be compared to words of Latin or Greek origin in English. While there is no proven relationship that exist among the languages that have been significantly impacted by the Chinese language, unlike with Greek and Latin where the vast majority of the languages they influenced significantly were Indo-European, the impact the Chinese language had on other East Asian languages, including Japanese, is undeniable.

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