Japanese Writing System - Spacing and Punctuation

Spacing and Punctuation

Japanese is written without spaces between words, and text is normally allowed to wrap from one line to the next without regard for word boundaries. In some cases, such as concatenated compounds, it may not even be clear where "word" boundaries ought to lie, resulting in varying romanization styles. For example, 結婚する, meaning "to marry", and composed of the noun 結婚 (kekkon, "marriage") combined with する (suru, "to do"), is romanised as kekkonsuru by some authors but kekkon suru by others.

Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a nakaguro (中黒, "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers. For example, ビル・ゲイツ (Bill Gates).

The Japanese full stop (。) and comma (、) are used used for similar purposes to their English equivalents, though comma usage can be more fluid than is the case in English. The question mark (？) is not used in traditional or formal Japanese, but it may be used in informal writing, or in transcriptions of dialogue where it might not otherwise be clear that a statement was intoned as a question. The exclamation mark (！) is restricted to informal writing. Colons and semicolons are available but are not common in ordinary text. Quotation marks are written as 「 ... 」 or in some contexts 『 ... 』. Several bracket styles and dashes are available.