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Katakana
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Katakana (片仮名, カ タ カ ナ or か たか


Katakana
な ? ) is a Japanese syllabary, one component
of the Japanese writing system along with Type Syllabary
hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin Languages Japanese, Okinawan and Ainu
alphabet. The word katakana means
"fragmentary kana," as they are derived from Time period ~800 A.D. to the present
components of more complex kanji. Parent systems Kanji


Man’y gana
Katakana are characterized by short straight Katakana
strokes and angular corners, and are the
simplest of the Japanese scripts. Sister systems Hiragana, Hentaigana
There are two main systems of ordering Unicode range U+30A0–U+30FF
(http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U30A0.pdf)

katakana, the old-fashioned iroha ordering,
and the more prevalent goj on ordering. ISO 15924 Kana

Contents
1 Usage
2 Orthography
3 Table of katakana
4 History
5 Computer encoding
5.1 Unicode
6 Katakana for the Ainu language
7 Example transcriptions of
Katakana and foreign languages
7.1 Medicine
7.2 Computing
7.3 Names
7.4 Regions
7.5 Nations and cities
8 See also
9 External links

Usage
In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of words from
foreign languages (called gairaigo). For example, "television" is written terebi (テ レ


ビ ? ). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names and foreign place and
personal names. For example America is written Amerika (America has
its own kanji (ateji) Amerika (亜 米利加 ) or for short, Beikoku (米国 ? ) which
?

literally means "Rice Country"). Japanese

writing

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Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, letters used to represent sounds, for example
pinpon (ピ ン ポ ン ? ), the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell, would usually be written in Kanji
katakana.
Kana
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and Hiragana
minerals are also commonly written in katakana. Katakana
Hentaigana

names. For example Suzuki is written


Katakana are also often, but not always, used for transcription of Japanese company
, and Toyota is written .
 Uses
Man’y gana


Katakana are also used for emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and 

hoardings. For example, it is common to see koko ("here"), gomi ("trash") Furigana
Okurigana
or megane ("glasses"), and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also
sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the European usage of italics.

R maji

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

 

 

 

  (/ ), m jan (mahjong); in Mandarin májiàng
 
 
 
  ( ),  roncha (Oolong tea), from Mandarin w  lóng
 ( ),chch han
( ),
 
, (fried rice)
 ( ), sh mai , from sh , from Cantonese cha siu, roast pig
Cantonese siu maai, a kind of dim sum.

The very common Chinese loanword

 ( r men ) is rarely written with its kanji  .
There are rare cases where the opposite
katakana. An example of this is

 
 
  ( k hii ), "coffee", which can be alternatively written as
has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally 
 
written
. This
in

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

represented by
( konnichiwa) instead of the more usual hiragana

foreign characters, robots etc. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be
( 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",
 
, hifuka, the second kanji, , is considered

kanji such as

difficult, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written as or
gan, "cancer", are often written in katakana or hiragana.
in katakana. Similarly, difficult

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Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ry  of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku
ensembles with koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi.

Orthography
Foreign phrases are sometimes transliterated with a middle dot called nakaguro (中黒 ? ) 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 (konpy ta g mu)(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 ch on . 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 ( )( r soku )(candle) or
( )( k tai )(mobile phone).





A small tsu called a sokuon indicates a geminate consonant, which is represented in r maji by doubling the
following consonant. For example, bed is written in katakana as ( 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 (Bahha); Mach is
(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












(Furushichofu). Ali Khamenei is (Arii H meneii). The Japanese Wikipedia has


references to (Itsuhaku P ruman) and (Its ku
P ruman), 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 and tsu , as well as so and n , look very similar in print except
for the slant and stroke shape. (These differences are more prominent when written with an ink brush, due to the
directions of the strokes.)

vowels 
y on
a i u e o ya yu yo
ka ki ku ke ko
kya
kyu
kyo
sa shi su se so
sha
shu
sho
ta chi tsu te to
cha
chu
cho
na ni nu ne no
nya
nyu
nyo
ha hi fu he ho
hya
hyu
hyo
ma mi mu me mo
mya
myu
myo
ya yu yo
ra ri ru re ro
rya
ryu
ryo

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wa wi we wo 1

n
ga gi gu ge go

gya

gyu

gyo
za ji zu ze zo

ja

ju

jo
da (ji) (zu) de do

( ja)

( ju)

( jo)
ba bi bu be bo

bya

byu

byo

pa pi pu pe po pya pyu pyo
va vi vu

ve vo vya vyu vyo

she

je

che

si

zi




ti

tu

tyu

di du


dyu

tsa
fa

tsi
fi

tse
fe

tso
fo

fyu






2 2
yi ( ) ye
wi we wo

)




2
wu

)

(
(
kwa
gwa

kwi
gwi

kwe
gwe

kwo
gwo

1
: ("wo") sounds the same as ("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] (http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/manya-isi/iroha.htm) [2]
(http://www.geocities.jp/itikun01/hibi/zat2.html)

History

Katakana was developed in the early Heian Period from parts of man’y gana characters as a form of shorthand.
For example, ka comes from the left side of ka "increase". The table below shows the origins of each
katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character eventually became each corresponding symbol.

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Computer encoding
In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS), many fonts
intended for Chinese text also include katakana (such as MS Song).

Katakana have two forms of encoding, halfwidth hankaku (半角 ? ) and fullwidth zenkaku (全角 ? ). 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]
(http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U30A0.pdf) :

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
30A
30B
30C
30D
30E
30F

Halfwidth equivalents to the fullwidth katakana also exist. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth
Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF) [4] (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf) , starting at U+FF65 and
ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks):

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
FF6
FF7
FF8
FF9

Code points 32D0 to 32FE list Circled Katakana. Note: A circled is missing

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
32D
32E
32F

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 ( u followed by small pu). In
Unicode, the Katakana Phonetic Extensions block (U+31F0–U+31FF) [5]
(http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U31F0.pdf) exists for Ainu language support. These characters are used
mainly for the Ainu language only:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
31F

Example transcriptions of Katakana and foreign languages

Medicine

Original word Katakana 

R maji
Vitamin (de)


Bitamin
Mineral (en)


Mineraru
Calcium (la)



Karushiumu
Hormone (en)


Horumon

Computing

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Original word Katakana 

R maji Kanji and other words
Mouse (en)

Mausu
Keyboard (en)



Kiib do 
Display (en)




Disupurei
gamen
Pointer (en)


Pointa
Programming (en)





Puroguramingu
Software (en)




Sofutouea
Hardware (en)




H douea 











Operating system (en)




Oper tingu
shisutemu kihonsofuto OS esu

Internet (en)





Int netto 

Web (en)

Uebu

Names
from English names

Original word Katakana 

R maji
John (en)

Jon
George (en)



J ji
Marie (en)

Marii
Michael (en)


Maikeru

from German names

Maria (de)

Maria

Michael (de)



,


Mihaeru, Mihyaeru

Regions

Original word Katakana 

R maji Kanji
America (en)


Amerika
beikoku
Latin America (en)





Raten Amerika

ch nambei
Europe (pt)




Y roppa
 sh
Asia (en)

Ajia
ash
Africa (en)


Afurika
ash
Oceania (en)



Oseania

taiy sh
Nations and cities

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Original word Katakana 

R maji English name Local name
New York (en)




Ny Y ku  
Los Angeles (en) (es)




Rosanzerusu
Canada (en)

Kanada
Toronto (en)


Toronto
Argentina (en) (es)




Aruzenchin
Buenos Aires (en)






Buenosu Airesu
Brazil (en)


Burajiru Brasil (pt)
London (en)


Rondon
Suomi (fi)




Finrando Finland (en) Suomi (fi)
France (fr) (en)


Furansu
Paris (fr)
Pari
Singapore (en)




Shingap ru 
Deutschland (de)

Doitsu Germany (en)
Berlin (de)


Berurin
Portugal (pt) (en)



Porutogaru
Lisbon (en)


Risbon Lisboa (pt)
Lithuania (en)



Rituania Lithuania (en) Lietuva (lt)
Olanda (pt) / Holanda
(pt) / Holland (nl) (en)



Oranda
Holland / The
Netherlands (en)
Holland /
Nederland (nl)
Poland (en)




P rando Polska (pl)
Italia (it)


Itaria Italy (en)
Roma (it) (lt)

R ma  Rome (en)
Mexico (en)


Mekishiko Mexico (es)
Madrid (en)



Madoriddo
 
 ,
Russia (en)

Roshia Rossiya (ru)
India (en)

Indo
Bh rat (hi)
Indonesia (id)




Indoneshia
Malaysia (ms)



Mareshia
Seattle (en)


Shiatoru

Shanghai (en)



Shanhai

(cn)
, Shanghai

Philippines (en)



Firipin Pilipinas (fil)

Bulgaria (en)



Burugaria  (bg)

See also
Japanese phonology for pronunciation.
Hiragana
Historical kana usage for a discussion of pre-war kana spelling

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R maji for a comparison of romanization systems

Taiwanese kana, katakana-based writing system once used for Taiwanese language

External links
Katakana code chart at Unicode.org (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U30A0.pdf)
Real Kana (http://www.realkana.com) Practice katakana using different typefaces
katakana stroke order diagrams on nihongoresources.com
(http://www.nihongoresources.com/language/lessons/lesson-00/katakana.html#diagrams)
Animations showing how to write katakana (http://www.users.pjwstk.edu.pl/~s4087/katakana.html)
Learn Katakana (http://www.solosequenosenada.com/gramatica/japanese/Learn_Katakana.php) , simple
game to learn Katakana alphabet.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana"

Categories: Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes | Japanese writing system | Japanese words and phrases |
Kana

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