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Concept
Katakana
Summary
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).
The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (katakana カ); or "n" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng (ŋ) or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician.
In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals and often Japanese companies.
Katakana evolved from Japanese Buddhist monks transliterating Chinese texts into Japanese.
The complete katakana script consists of 48 characters, not counting functional and diacritic marks:
5 nucleus vowels
42 core or body (onset-nucleus) syllabograms, consisting of nine consonants in combination with each of the five vowels, of which three possible combinations (yi, ye, wu) are not canonical
1 coda consonant
These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, literally "fifty sounds"), as shown in the adjacent table, read ア (a), イ (i), ウ (u), エ (e), オ (o), カ (ka), キ (ki), ク (ku), ケ (ke), コ (ko) and so on. The gojūon inherits its vowel and consonant order from Sanskrit practice. In vertical text contexts, which used to be the default case, the grid is usually presented as 10 columns by 5 rows, with vowels on the right hand side and ア (a) on top.
Official source
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