Japanese Hiragana
Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown
below. Hiragana were originally called onnade
or ‘women’s hand’ as were used mainly by women – men wrote in
kanji and katakana.
By the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word hiragana means
"oridinary syllabic script".
In early versions of hiragana there were often many different characters
to represent the same syllable, however the system was eventually simplified
so that there was a one-to-one relationship between spoken and written
syllables. The present orthography of hiragana was codified by the Japanese
government in 1946.
Hiragana and the kanji from which they developed
In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols
in the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right. There
is some dispute about the orgins of some of the symbols
The symbols for ‘wi’ and ‘we’ were made obsolete by the Japanese Minsitry
of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms. The symbols ‘ha’,
‘he’ and ‘wo’ are pronounced ‘wa’, ‘e’ and ‘o’ respectively when used
as grammatical particles.
Hirgana syllabary (平仮名 / ひらがな)
The symbols on the right are the basic hiragana syllabary in the order
they appear in dictionaries and indices (reading from left to right and
top to bottom). Additional sounds (the symbols on the right) are represented
by diacritics and combinations of symbols.
Long vowels
Download this chart in Word,
or PDF format (also includes katakana).
See a Hiragana chart by Kayo Takumyo (JPG, 409K).
Pronunciation
Characteristics and usage of hiragana
The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to
write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are
also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and
comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written
with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words
whose kanji are obscure or obselete.
Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to indicate
pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is obscure or non-standard.
Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana or ruby.
In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in vertical
texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji. In newspapers it is
a legal requirement for furigana to be attached to kanji which are not included
in the official list of the 1,945 most frequently-used kanji. Newspapers in
fact rarely use kanji not included in this list.
Furigana in action
The furigana in the following text are the small hiragana above or beside
the kanji.
Horizontal text with furigana
This text in hiragana
This text in standard Japanese (without furigana)
Transliteration (rōmaji)
Subete no ningen wa, umare nagara ni shite jiyū de ari, katsu, songen to kenri
to ni tsuite byōdō de aru. Ningen wa, risei to ryōshin to o
sazukerareteari, tagai ni dōhō no seishin o motte
kōdōshinakerebanaranai.