is a
Japanese syllabary, one component of the
Japanese writing system along with
hiragana,
kanji, and in some cases the
Latin alphabet. The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary
kana," as they are derived from components of more complex kanji.
Katakana are characterized by short straight strokes and angular corners, and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts.
There are two main systems of
ordering katakana, the old-fashioned
iroha ordering, and the more prevalent
gojūon ordering.
Usage
In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for
transcription of words from foreign languages (called ''
gairaigo''). For example, "television" is written . Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names and foreign place and personal names. For example
America is written アメリカ ''Amerika'' (America has its own
kanji (
ateji) or for short, which literally means "Rice Country").
Katakana are also used for
onomatopoeia, letters used to represent sounds, for example , the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell, would usually be written in katakana.
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant
species and
minerals are also commonly written in katakana.
Katakana are also often, but not always, used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example
Suzuki is written スズキ, and
Toyota is written トヨタ. Katakana are also used for
emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and hoardings. For example, it is common to see ココ ''koko'' ("here"), ゴミ ''gomi'' ("trash") or メガネ ''megane'' ("glasses"), and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the European usage of
italics.
Pre-
World War II official documents mix katakana and kanji in the same way that hiragana and kanji are mixed in modern Japanese texts, that is, katakana were used for ''
okurigana'' and
particles such as ''wa'' or ''o''.
Katakana were also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988 and before the introduction of multibyte characters in computer systems in the 1980s. Most computers used katakana instead of kanji and/or hiragana for output.
Although words borrowed from ancient
Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects which are borrowed directly rather than using the
Sino-Japanese ''
on'yomi'' readings, are often written in katakana. Examples include
★ マージャン (麻將/麻雀), ''mājan'' (
mahjong); in Mandarin ''májiàng''
★ ウーロン茶 (烏龍茶), ''ūroncha'' (
Oolong tea), from Mandarin ''wūlóng''
★ チャーハン (炒飯), ''chāhan'', (
fried rice)
★ チャーシュー(叉焼), ''chāshū'', from
Cantonese ''
cha siu'', roast pork
★ シューマイ (焼売), ''shūmai'', from Cantonese ''siu maai'', a kind of
dim sum.
The very common Chinese loanword ラーメン (
rāmen) is rarely written with its kanji 拉麺.
There are rare cases where the opposite has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally written in katakana. An example of this is コーヒー (''kōhii''), "coffee", which can be alternatively written as 珈琲. This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty.
Katakana are sometimes used instead of
hiragana as
furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original.
Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent, by foreign characters, robots etc. For example, in a
manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by コンニチワ (''konnichiwa'') instead of the more usual hiragana こんにちは (''konnichi wa'').
Katakana are also used to indicate the ''
on'yomi'' (
Chinese-derived readings) of a
kanji in a
kanji dictionary.
Some
Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names.
It is very common to write words with difficult-to-read kanji in katakana. This phenomenon is often seen with
medical terminology. For example, in the word "
dermatology", 皮膚科, ''hifuka'', the second kanji, 膚, is considered difficult, and thus the word ''hifuka'' is commonly written as 皮フ科 or ヒフ科 in katakana. Similarly, difficult kanji such as 癌 ''gan'', "cancer", are often written in katakana or hiragana.
Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the ''
Tozan-
ryū'' of ''
shakuhachi'', and in ''
sankyoku'' ensembles with ''
koto'', ''
shamisen'', and ''shakuhachi''.
Orthography
Foreign phrases are sometimes transliterated with a
middle dot called or a space separating the words. However, in cases where it is assumed that the reader knows the separate gairaigo words in the phrase, the middle dot is not used. For example, the phrase コンピュータゲーム (kompyūta gēmu)(computer game), containing two very well-known gairaigo, is not written with a middle dot.
Katakana spelling differs slightly from hiragana. While hiragana spells
long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana, katakana usually uses a 'vowel extender mark' called a
chōon. This mark is a short line following the direction of the text, horizontal in
yokogaki, or horizontal text, and vertical in
tategaki, or vertical text. However, it is more often used when writing foreign loanwords; long vowels in Japanese words written in katakana are usually written as they would be in hiragana. There are exceptions such as ローソク(蝋燭)(''rōsoku'')(candle) or ケータイ(携帯)(''kētai'')(mobile phone).
A small ''tsu'' ッ called a ''
sokuon'' indicates a
geminate consonant, which is represented in
rōmaji by doubling the following consonant. For example, ''bed'' is written in katakana as ベッド (''beddo'').
The ''sokuon'' is sometimes used in places which have no equivalent in native sounds. For example, double-h in place of ch is common in German names. Bach, for example, comes out as バッハ (Bahha); Mach is マッハ (Mahha). The doubling of the "h" in Bach and Mach (or the underlying small tsu) is probably the kana that best fits those German names.
Related sounds in various languages are hard to express in Japanese, so Khrushchev becomes フルシチョフ (Furushichofu). Ali Khamenei is アリー・ハーメネイー (Arii Hāmeneii). The Japanese Wikipedia has references to イツハク・パールマン (Itsuhaku Pāruman) and イツァーク・パールマン (Itsāku Pāruman),
Itzhak Perlman.
Table of katakana
This is a table of katakana together with their
Hepburn romanization. The first chart sets out the standard katakana (characters in
red are obsolete, and characters in
green are modern additions to the katakana, used mainly to represent sounds from other languages.) Learning to read katakana is often complicated by the similarities between different characters. For example, ''shi'' シ and ''tsu'' ツ , as well as ''so'' ソ and ''n'' ン , look almost the same except for the slant and stroke shape.
:
1:
ヲ ("wo") sounds the same as
オ ("o"), but it's rarely used except when the corresponding
hiragana has to be represented in an all-katakana environment.
:
2: These katakana were introduced into the education system in the early
Meiji period, but never became widespread.
[1] [2]
History
Katakana was developed in the early
Heian Period from parts of ''
man'yōgana'' characters as a form of shorthand. For example, ''ka'' カ comes from the left side of ''ka'' 加 "increase". The table below shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original
Chinese character eventually became each corresponding symbol.
Computer encoding
Katakana have two forms of encoding,
halfwidth and fullwidth . The halfwidth forms come from
JIS X 0201 originally. This includes halfwidth Katakana in right side area of
ASCII. That is, most halfwidth Katakana could be represented by one byte each. In the late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as
JIS X 0208 were introduced to represent Hiraganas, Kanjis and other characters. JIS_X_0208 has its own Katakana area independently of one-byte character set such as JIS_X_0201. Katakana of JIS_X_0208 takes two-byte (at least), so many (especially old) devices output these Katakanas as two-byte-width. This is why Katakana of JIS_X_0201 is called ''halfwidth'' and JIS_X_0208, ''fullwidth''. Therefore, most encodings have no halfwidth Hiragana.
Although often said to be obsolete, in fact the halfwidth katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of
mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or halfwidth katakana, and halfwidth katakana were commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as
EUC-JP,
Unicode and
Shift-JIS have halfwidth Katakana code as well as fullwidth. By contrast,
ISO-2022-JP has no halfwidth Katakana, and is mainly used over
SMTP and
NNTP. Halfwidth katakana are commonly used to save memory space.
Unicode
In
Unicode, fullwidth katakana occupy code points U+30A0 to U+30FF
[3]:
Halfwidth equivalents to the fullwidth katakana also exist. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF)
[4], starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks):
Code points 32D0 to 32FE list Circled Katakana. Note: A circled ン is missing
Katakana for the Ainu language
Katakana is sometimes used to write the
Ainu language. In Ainu language katakana usage, the consonant that comes at the end of a syllable is represented by a small version of a katakana that corresponds to that final consonant and with an arbitrary vowel. For instance "up" is represented by ウㇷ゚ (''u'' followed by small ''pu''). In Unicode, the Katakana Phonetic Extensions block (U+31F0–U+31FF)
[5] exists for Ainu language support. These characters are used mainly for the Ainu language only:
Example transcriptions of Katakana and foreign languages
Medicine
Computing
Names
Regions
Nations and cities
See also
★
Japanese phonology for pronunciation.
★
Hiragana
★
Historical kana usage for a discussion of pre-war kana spelling
★
Rōmaji for a comparison of
romanization systems
★
Transcribing English to Japanese
★
★
Taiwanese kana, katakana-based writing system once used for
Taiwanese language
External links
★
Katakana code chart at Unicode.org
★
Real Kana Practice katakana using different typefaces
★
katakana stroke order diagrams on nihongoresources.com
★
Animations showing how to write katakana
★
Learn Katakana, simple game to learn Katakana alphabet.
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