Languages in Japan

The vast majority of Japan's citizens (99%) speak Japanese as their primary language.  Japanese is in the Japonic language family, and seems to be unrelated to Chinese and Korean. However, Japanese has borrowed heavily from Chinese, English, and other languages. In fact, 49% of Japanese words are loan-words from Chinese, and 9% come from English.  Three writing systems coexist in Japan: hiragana, used for native Japanese words, inflected verbs, etc.; katakana, used for non-Japanese loanwords, emphasis, and onomatopoeia; and kanji, which is used to express the large number of Chinese loan-words in the Japanese language.