Japanese (日本語 / にほんご , Nihongo (help·info)) is a language spoken by over 140 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages, but there is no widely accepted evidence of a relationship with any other languages. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system.