[steven]

That sounds like a really hard task. Keep in mind this is coming from an American, but that kind of research seems like it's beyond the scope of high school.

I think what you'd discover researching something like this is that Japanese history is connected to Japanese dialects. There are many dialects in Japan... and some of them contain older ways of saying things. Sometimes you'll find dialects in two completely different areas that are similar to each other. Studying Japanese history gives clues (or sometimes flat out reasons) as to why this is.

Unfortunately I don't know of any books or websites that cover that kind of thing. I'd be interested in anything you or anyone else finds though!

Here's an idea though-- you could try to talk about Japan's writing systems. I think that you could speak fairly generally about that. Japanese has "katakana", "hiragana", and "kanji". "Kanji" came from china and the other two writing systems were derived from "kanji". Furthermore, "katakana" is used a lot of the time to write foreign words. In fact, you could probably do an entire paper on "katakana" alone. Katakana, like I said, is used for loanwords. Some of those words can be traced back to when Portugal was in Japan and some of them can be traced back to when Japan had a lot of interaction with Germany (pre-war/war era) and some of them can be traced back to post-war era Japan (during the occupation). I guess an interesting thing about "hiragana" is that there are some older characters that are no longer in use-- however, sometimes you can still find them. For example, there is a beer brand called "ebisu" the character for the "e" sound is written with an old character (which is kind of like "ye").

But ya, I think it'd be quite a task. If you were to do something like that, first you'd have to get your facts (I wouldn't go by what I said as there may be mistakes in there or better, clearer ways of saying things), then you have to find a concise way of putting it all together as to connect the language, the history, and the culture together.

Good luck!