Did you know that Iran is teeming with minority languages? Persian is the Middle Eastern country’s sole official language, and most people living in Iran have to learn Persian for daily life in the country, with Iranian education, administration, and media generally using only Persian. But only around half of Iranians speak Persian as their native language—the rest speak one of dozens of minority languages. The biggest minority languages in Iran are Azerbaijani and Kurdish, but Gilaki also ranks as one of the most spoken minority languages in the country.
Gilaki has an estimated 2.4 million native speakers, so while it’s a far cry from Persian’s 81 million native speakers, it nonetheless constitutes the native language of a sizable community within Iran. However, minority languages in Iran are generally not treated favorably, with the central government pushing for Persian in all aspects of life across Iran. Native speakers of Gilaki receive education in Persian, consume national media in Persian, and use Persian in their interactions with the government, which threatens the status and vitality of their native Gilaki. Translation services for the minority language aren’t common, either, but here at TranslationServices.com, we’re doing our best to provide high-quality Gilaki services to all who need them.
Anyone who would like to see a free quote for our Gilaki translation services should reach out with a message today!
Here’s what the Gilaki language is like.
Gilaki speakers live along the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea, with a particular prevalence in the province of Gilan. Gilaki is also widely spoken in Iran’s Mazandaran, Qazvin, and Alborz provinces. The language is split into three distinct dialect groups—Western Gilaki, Eastern Gilaki, and Galeshi or Deylami Gilaki—and some dialects have limited mutual intelligibility with others, demonstrating significant diversity within Gilaki.
Coming from the Iranian branch of the Indo–European language family, Gilaki is related to Persian and has sustained considerable influence from the national language of Iran, but it remains a unique and independent language mutually unintelligible with Persian. In fact, Gilaki and fellow Iranian minority language Mazandarani share certain grammatical features with the entirely unrelated Kartvelian languages of Georgia, indicating close historical relations between the Gilaki and Georgian peoples. In terms of grammar, Gilaki uses a default word order of subject-verb-object, but certain tenses tend to produce a subject-object-verb order instead. Gilaki lacks grammatical gender but incorporates a lot of inflection into its nouns and verbs, which can make the language difficult for learners to master.
Translating any texts you want to or from Gilaki
Here at TranslationServices.com, we pride ourselves on our flexibility. That’s not only in terms of how many languages we translate (hundreds from all around the world) but also in the kinds of documents we translate. Indeed, we work with everything from business documents like financial reports, white papers, business proposals, contracts, and ad copy to academic works like theses, journal articles, and research surveys, as well as literary works like novels, poems, short story collections, apps, games, and movie scripts. Our scope goes far beyond that—this is just a short list of examples to get you started.
We’re also flexible in terms of our Gilaki translation team. Our translators come from not only Gilan, where the majority of people are ethnically Gilaki, but also other provinces of Iran, and we proudly cover all three major dialects of the Gilaki language. We ensure that all our Gilaki translators are proud native speakers of this Iranian minority language who are passionate about bridging the language barrier between Gilaki and the rest of the world—so whether you’re looking to translate into Gilaki or from Gilaki, you can count on our team.
For translation of all kinds of documents to or from any dialect of Gilaki, our team is eager to help. Why not send us a message today telling us about the details of your Gilaki translation project?