Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな) is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and in some cases rōmaji (the Latin-script alphabet).
Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems; they have corresponding character sets in which each kana, or character, represents one mora (one sound in the Japanese language). Each kana is either a vowel such as "a" (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (hiragana か); or "n" (hiragana ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n, or ng ([ŋ]), or like the nasal vowels of French.
Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants
(except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabaries
and not alphabets.[1]
Hiragana is used to write native words for which there are no kanji, including grammatical particles such as から kara "from", and suffixes such as さん ~san
"Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms." Likewise, hiragana is used to write words whose
kanji form is obscure, not known to the writer or readers, or too formal
for the writing purpose. There is also some flexibility for words that
have common kanji renditions to be optionally written instead in
hiragana, according to an individual author's preference. Verb and adjective inflections, as, for example, be-ma-shi-ta (べました) in tabemashita (食べました, "ate"),
are written in hiragana, often following a verb or adjective root
(here, "食") that is written in kanji. When Hiragana is used to show the pronunciation of kanji characters as reading aid, it is referred to as furigana. The article Japanese writing system discusses in detail how the various systems of writing are used.
There are two main systems of ordering hiragana, the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.
Writing system
The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 characters:
- 5 singular vowels
- Notionally, 45 consonant–vowel unions, consisting of 9 consonants in combination with each of the 5 vowels, of which:
- 2 (yi, and wu) are unused
- 3 (ye, wi, and we) are obsolete in modern Japanese
- 1 (wo) is usually pronounced as a vowel (o) in modern Japanese, and is preserved in only one use, as a particle
- 1 singular consonant
These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, lit. "Fifty Sounds"), as illustrated in the adjacent table, with the extra character being the anomalous singular consonant ん (N).
Romanisation of the kana does not always strictly follow the consonant-vowel scheme laid out in the table. For example, ち, nominally ti, is very often romanised as chi in an attempt to better represent the actual sound in Japanese.
These basic characters can be modified in various ways. By adding a dakuten marker ( ゛), a voiceless consonant is turned into a voiced consonant: k→g, ts/s→z, t→d, h→b and ch/sh→j. Hiragana beginning with an h can also add a handakuten marker ( ゜) changing the h to a p.
A small version of the hiragana for ya, yu or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively) may be added to hiragana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o. Addition of the small y kana is called yōon. For example, き (ki) plus ゃ (small ya) becomes きゃ (kya).
A small tsu っ, called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). For example, compare さか saka "hill" with さっか sakka "author". It also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop, as in いてっ! ([iteʔ] Ouch!). However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables' consonants – to double them, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable.
Hiragana usually spells long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana. The chōonpu (long vowel mark) (ー) used in katakana is rarely used with hiragana, for example in the word らーめん, rāmen, but this usage is considered non-standard. In informal writing, small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds (はぁ haa, ねぇ nee). Standard and voiced iteration marks are written in hiragana as ゝ and ゞ respectively.
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