User:RJCraig/Literary Japanese

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Literary Japanese (文語, bungo^?) was the standard written form of the Japanese language from the classical Heian period (ca. 900-1200 CE) until well after the Meiji Restoration (1868). Use of the literary language started to decline during the Meiji period as authors increasingly composed works in a more vernacular style, but newspapers and official documents were still written in the old literary style. After the reforms following World War II, written Japanese has conformed more closely to the modern spoken language, although the old literary style continues to be used in traditional genres of literature such as tanka and haiku.