Editing Classical Japanese (section)

== History ==

Classical Japanese began to be written during the Heian period, at which point it was very similar to spoken Japanese. It became the written standard for the Japanese language for many centuries, though the spoken language continued to evolve and by the [[Edo period]] was substantially different from classical Japanese.<ref name="komai">Komai, Akira. (1983) "Classical Japanese" ''Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan Volume 1'' pp.321–322.</ref> This is known as [[diglossia]], a situation in which two forms of a language, in this case a written and spoken form, coexist.<ref>Árokay, Judit. (2014) "Discourse on Poetic Languages in Early Modern Japan and the Awareness of Linguistic Change" ''Divided Languages?'' eds. Judit Árokay, Jadranka Gvozdanović, and Darja Miyajima p.88.</ref> During the Meiji period, some intellectuals sought the abolition of classical Japanese, such as the Genbun Itchi movement, which proposed that written Japanese conform to the vernacular spoken language. [[Futabatei Shimei]]'s 1887 novel ''[[The Drifting Cloud]]'' was one of the first novels to be written in vernacular Japanese rather than classical. By 1908, novels no longer used classical Japanese, and by the 1920s the same was true of all newspapers.<ref>Neustupny, JV. (1983) "Gembun Itchi" ''Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan Volume 3'' p.16.</ref> Government documents remained in classical Japanese until 1946.<ref>Trantor, Nicholas and Kizu, Mika. (2012) "Modern Japanese" ''The Languages of Japan and Korea'' ed. Nicolas Trantor p.268.</ref> Classical Japanese continues to be taught in Japanese high schools and universities due to its importance in the study of traditional Japanese literature.<ref name="komai"/>