Hiragana
ひらがな
Hiragana is one of Japan's three scripts (alongside katakana and kanji). It's a syllabary — each character is a whole consonant-vowel syllable, not a single sound — and is used for native Japanese words, grammatical endings, and particles. The 46 basic hiragana cover every syllable in Japanese.
All 46 syllables
History
Hiragana evolved from Chinese characters that were being used purely for their sound value in the 8th–9th centuries — a practice called man'yōgana. Over generations of cursive writing, these characters got simplified into the flowing rounded shapes we use today. Hiragana was historically associated with women's writing; the great classical novel The Tale of Genji, written around 1000 CE by Murasaki Shikibu, is almost entirely in hiragana because Chinese-style writing was considered a male domain. That gendered division has long since disappeared — today every Japanese schoolchild learns hiragana first.
Things you might not know
- The complete list of all hiragana syllables in order spells the Iroha poem — a 9th-century Buddhist verse that uses each kana exactly once.
- A small っ (sokuon) doubles the following consonant, like the "tt" in "かって" (katte, "bought").
- Hiragana shapes come from cursive simplifications of specific kanji — あ from 安, き from 幾, の from 乃, and so on.
- Japanese uses all three scripts in a single sentence: kanji for content words, hiragana for grammar, and katakana for foreign loanwords.