A foreign language is a language not spoken by the people of a certain place: for example, English is a foreign language in Japan. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referre to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her. These two characterizations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate.