If you know Burkina Faso, a small, landlocked country in West Africa, you may be aware that the country is a member of the Francophone world, with the country’s government, education, and mass media all operating in French. However, Burkina Faso’s linguistic landscape isn’t quite that simple. Despite French’s high status in the country, fewer than 15% of the population actually uses it on a daily basis, with most people relying on one of the 60 indigenous languages spoken across the land. Indeed, Burkina Faso is remarkably diverse in its ethnolinguistic makeup, with its many languages hailing from different families.
While roughly 60 indigenous languages abound throughout Burkina Faso, one clearly takes the cake: Mooré. Also known as Mossi, this language is the native tongue of half of Burkina Faso’s population and is the primary language used in Ouagadougou, the national capital. Mooré is recognized, alongside Fula and Dyula, as the national language of the country, although speakers of the dozens of smaller indigenous languages have protested the exclusion of their languages. Mooré is also the basis for half of the country’s name, as burkina means “man of integrity” in the language.
With Mooré boasting more than 7 million native speakers, including half of the Burkinabe population, you’d think more translation services would offer it, but few do. Here at TranslationServices.com, however, we’re proud to translate to and from Mooré—and we can provide a free quote to anyone who messages us and asks.
Taking a closer look at Mooré
It’s not just Burkina Faso that the 7+ million native speakers of Mooré hail from—they can also be found in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Togo, Niger, and Senegal, with Burkina Faso and Benin officially recognizing the language. In addition to the millions of native speakers, many millions more have learned Mooré as a second language, including many Burkinabe people. Mooré is written in the Latin alphabet, but it incorporates a few new letters—ɛ, ɩ, and ʋ—to adapt to its unique phonology.
Mooré comes from the Gur subfamily of the Niger–Congo macrofamily, the biggest language family in the world. It uses a subject-verb-object word order, like English and many other languages in the Niger–Congo family, including the Bantu languages. Mooré exhibits less inflection than the Bantu languages, however, with verbs including only tense and aspect markers—no person or noun class agreement markers. But that doesn’t mean Mooré is simple, and its grammar still differs substantially from English.
Proud to translate all sorts of content to and from Mooré
We’re committed to providing top-notch translation services for Mooré—services you can rely on for quality and accuracy, no matter what kind of content you’d like translated. We built our team by searching for the most skilled and experienced Mooré translators from around Burkina Faso, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Togo, and Niger, all of whom are enthusiastic native speakers of the tongue. Our translators hail from different backgrounds not only in regard to dialect but also in terms of their translation expertise, allowing us to translate both to and from Mooré for all sorts of content.
For example, we can help businesspeople in need of Mooré translation services, whether that entails translating marketing material from Mooré to capture the attention of the international market or translating employment contracts into Mooré as you look to hire Burkinabe locals. We’d also be delighted to help with academic translation, regardless of the field, helping Burkinabe researchers spread their scholarly work abroad and international academics connect with local peers and research subjects in the Mooré-speaking region. And, of course, we’re always available for literary translation and localization—we can translate rich Burkinabe stories into English and help spread awareness of Mooré culture, and we can translate foreign stories and media into Mooré to bring great new content to a whole new world of people.
What do you need for your Mooré translation project? Contact us today and let us know!