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Japanese grammar
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{{Short description|Grammar of the Japanese language}} {{More citations needed|date=August 2019}} {{Use American English|date=February 2019}} [[Japanese language|Japanese]] is an [[Agglutinative language|agglutinative]], [[Synthetic language|synthetic]], [[Mora (linguistics)#Japanese|mora]]-timed language with simple [[phonotactics]], a [[Monophthong|pure]] vowel system, phonemic [[Vowel length#Phonemic vowel length|vowel]] and [[Gemination|consonant]] length, and a lexically significant [[Japanese pitch accent|pitch-accent]]. Word order is normally [[subject–object–verb]] with [[Japanese particles|particles]] marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is [[topic–comment]]. Its phrases are exclusively [[head-final]] and compound sentences are exclusively [[branching (linguistics)|left-branching]].{{efn|In contrast, [[Romance languages]] such as [[Spanish language|Spanish]] are strongly right-branching, and [[Germanic languages]] such as [[English language|English]] are weakly right-branching.}} [[Sentence-final particle]]s are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no [[Article (grammar)|articles]]. Verbs are [[Japanese verb conjugation|conjugated]], primarily for [[Grammatical tense|tense]] and [[Voice (grammar)|voice]], but not [[Grammatical person|person]]. [[Japanese adjectives]] are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of [[Honorific speech in Japanese|honorifics]] with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned. In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages.
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