Japanese Studies Linguistics & Literature: Getting Started

Includes not only important bibliographical databases, such as Nihon Kotenseki sōgō mokuroku, but also several full-text and image databases. Must register to use.

Nichibunken has created many databases, especially on art (foreign images of Japan, Japanese art in overseas collections etc.) but also provides Enpon. collections of renga, waka, haikai and Japanese folktales. Some databases can only be used at Nichibunken.

A branch of the National Diet Library. Its digital gallery includes Edo picture books and Kodomo no kuni, Artist and children's books in 1920s Japan.

This site, which emanates from Bucknell University, is an exemplary web site with hundreds of useful links to other linguistic sites, including a vast array of online dictionaries.

This page by Atsushi Fukada and Kazumi Hatasa provides: A Guide to Japanese E-mail, some Japanese Freeware Projects from Purdue University, Electronic Picture Resources for Language Instruction and several articles on Computer-Assisted Language Learning for Japanese and Technology Literacy for Japanese Language Instructors.

The primary focus is to provide comprehensive assistance for Japanese language programs in the United States as well as arts and cultural programs in the western states. The site contains information on the Japan Foundations grant programs, list of grantees and materials at our Nihongo Library.

The National Language Research Institute was founded in 1948 to provide the organization and facilities for scientific research on the Japanese language.Under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, the Institute maintains comprehensive data on all linguistic research done on Japanese, which is published yearly as the Kokugo Nenkan, and work is in progress on gathering material for a citation dictionary of the Japanese language. Since the mid-1970's, the Center for Teaching of Japanese as a Second Language has been active in instructor training, development of teaching materials, and contrastive linguistic research.

Corpora is built by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (linked above). A corpus is an electronic collection of systematically gathered language data with a variety of tags added for linguistic analysis.

Links to about 40 publications available online by Japanologist/EFL Professor Steve McCarty in Japan. Links also to a Japanese language version of the same, and to some of the academic organizations involved. Includes studies on Japan from original sources, Japanese-English bilingualism, intercultural communication, and on efforts to indigenize the English language teaching profession in Japan. This Website also introduces the Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism, plus hi-tech approaches to trans-Pacific networking, viz. entirely online academic conferences, a Webbed MOO, an Asia-Pacific electronic journal and the East-West Discourse List.

For each language, it provides alternate names, number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliation, multilingualism of speakers, availability of the Bible and other demographic and sociolinguistic information (such as literacy rate, number of blind and deaf people, schools for blind and deaf). Can be searched by country and/or language.