> As for 日本語, if we look for にほんご and にっぽんご in the Google n-gram
> corpus, i.e. a collection of Japanese words taken from the WWW along
> with their counts, we see:
>
> にほんご397256 に̆
;ぽんご21818
>
> That demonstrates that both are used *by Japanese people* and that にほ
> んご is much more common.
To be more precise, it means Google found the string of hiragana
characters "にっぽんご" and decided to put those characters together as
a word 21,818 times. (?)
I wonder if practically all of those 21,800 hits are referring to the
textbook:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/にっぽんご
Sometimes I search for a Japanese word on Google, and all the pages I
get appear to be dictionaries! Sometimes I find a few blog posts,
amongst them, and in the cases where the word I'm actually searching for
was a typo, the characters are actually split across two words in the
blog post.
Darren