Although Hiragana is phonetic, it is used mainly for representing words native to Japanese (such as "neko", which means cat) or borrowed centuries ago from Chinese (such as "men", which means noodles). It is also used for particle?(s) and verb? endings. To write foreign or onomatopaeic? words, katakana is used. However, to give a "cute" appearance, hiragana is very often used in place of katakana. It is made of 46 characters, which consist mostly of vowels and vowel-consonant combinations such as "ka" or "hi", but include one symbol for a lone consonant, which sounds like English "m" or "n". Two diacritic(s) plus the use of digraph(s) greatly increase the number of possible sounds.
Hiragana formed from the practice which developed in the 8th century CE of using Chinese characters exclusively for their phonetic meanings. Literature was transcribed using a reduced set of characters. Eventually, the symbols were simplified, and the set reduced. The result was Hiragana.
Hiragana was not accepted by everyone. Many felt that the language of the educated was still Chinese. However it gained in popularity among women as they were not allowed higher education. Eventually, it became used by everyone.
The presence of hiragana characters is usually sufficient to identify a text as Japanese. However, not all Japanese text uses hiragana, and one Japanese word in some Chinese text would be enough to throw off a person using this rule.
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