Japanese ranks as the sixth language of the world with more than 125 million speakers in the island state of Japan. Its genetic relation has been a topic of heated discussion, but Altaic and Austronesian languages appear to have contributed to the early formation of this language. It has a long written tradition, which goes back to texts from the eighth century AD. The modern writing system employs a mixture of Chinese characters and two sets of syllabary developed from the Chinese characters. This book consists of fourteen chapters covering the phonology, morphology, the writing system, grammatical constructions, and discourse and pragmatic phenomena of Japanese. It provides researchers with a useful typological reference and students of Japanese with a theory-neutral introduction to current linguistic research issues.