Editing Japanese language (section)

===Politeness===
{{Main|Honorific speech in Japanese}}

Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. This reflects the hierarchical nature of Japanese society.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Miyagawa |first=Shigeru |title=The Japanese Language |url=http://web.mit.edu/jpnet/articles/JapaneseLanguage.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090720054510/http://web.mit.edu/jpnet/articles/JapaneseLanguage.html |archive-date=July 20, 2009 |access-date=January 16, 2011 |publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology}}</ref>

The Japanese language can express differing levels of social status. The differences in social position are determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other person might use a plainer form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children begin learning and using polite speech in basic forms from an early age, but their use of more formal and sophisticated polite speech becomes more common and expected as they enter their teenage years and start engaging in more adult-like social interactions. See ''[[uchi–soto]]''.

Whereas {{Nihongo3|polite language|丁寧語|teineigo}} is commonly an [[inflection]]al system, {{Nihongo3|respectful language|尊敬語|sonkeigo}} and {{Nihongo3|humble language|謙譲語|kenjōgo}} often employ many special honorific and humble alternate verbs: ''iku'' "go" becomes ''ikimasu'' in polite form, but is replaced by ''irassharu'' in honorific speech and ''ukagau'' or ''mairu'' in humble speech.

The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and their group. For example, the ''-san'' suffix ("Mr", "Mrs", "Miss", or "Mx") is an example of honorific language. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's in-group. When speaking directly to one's superior in one's company or when speaking with other employees within one's company about a superior, a Japanese person will use vocabulary and inflections of the honorific register to refer to the in-group superior and their speech and actions. When speaking to a person from another company (i.e., a member of an out-group), however, a Japanese person will use the plain or the humble register to refer to the speech and actions of their in-group superiors. In short, the register used in Japanese to refer to the person, speech, or actions of any particular individual varies depending on the relationship (either in-group or out-group) between the speaker and listener, as well as depending on the relative status of the speaker, listener, and third-person referents.

Most [[noun]]s in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of ''o-'' or ''go-'' as a prefix. ''o-'' is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas ''go-'' is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as ''gohan'' 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word ''tomodachi'' 'friend,' would become ''o-tomodachi'' when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a polite speaker may sometimes refer to ''mizu'' 'water' as ''o-mizu'' to show politeness.