The United States is a remarkably linguistically diverse country. Immigrants from all over the world have settled on the land, bringing their languages with them, which has resulted in an enormous number of immigrant languages spoken within the country. But not all of the US’s linguistic diversity comes from immigration. The land was already linguistically diverse before Europeans colonized it, with countless ethnolinguistic groups inhabiting the land from coast to coast. Many indigenous languages are still spoken in the US today, albeit by a small number of people, and one of them is Keres.
Keres is one of the biggest indigenous languages in the United States, spoken by roughly 13,000 people. Unfortunately, like all other Native American languages, it’s endangered, with most speakers also speaking English and fewer and fewer children learning their ancestral language. The Keres people are making efforts to ensure the survival of their precious language, an endeavor that we at TranslationServices.com are also passionate about. Sadly, there are few translation services available for endangered languages like Keres, which is why we’ve proudly created our own professional Keres translation team.
Discover our Keres translation rates by messaging us today and asking about a free quote!
Keres: a major language isolate in the United States
Most languages are part of a wider language family, having descended from ancient languages over hundreds or thousands of years. Languages that cannot be classified, however, are considered language isolates. Such is the case with Keres, which has no known relatives even among the languages spoken nearby, such as Navajo and Western Apache. Keres is native to New Mexico, where speakers are divided into seven mutually intelligible dialects. Keres was a solely spoken language for most of its history, with speakers resisting converting it into a spoken language, but an orthography based on the Latin script has now been developed.
Keres is an active–stative language, meaning that the grammar surrounding a verb changes depending on whether the subject is perceived as actively undertaking the action or passively undergoing it. In particular, this affects the person affixes appended to a verb. Keres verbs are remarkably complicated anyway, with various forms to mark aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Tense is usually indicated through temporal adverbs rather than affixes. Keres speakers can also indicate where they obtained information through evidentiality markers. The language is heavily prefixing despite generally being a verb-final language, which is somewhat rare.
What kind of Keres translation services would you like?
Our Keres translators love their language, and they’re passionate about ensuring it’s here to stay for centuries to come. That’s why they’re so eager to help with your Keres translation project, whether that means translation into Keres or from Keres. Given that Keres is only now making its debut as a written language, there may be limited opportunities to translate from Keres, but if you’d like to translate any documents, including traditional Keres stories that can help outsiders appreciate Keres culture, our team would be happy to oblige. As for translation into Keres, we’d love to translate whatever materials you have—whether that’s questionnaires, pedagogical content, books, websites, apps, games, poems, or more. These kinds of translations help Keres speakers enjoy their language in more domains.
If you want to get started with your Keres translation project, all you have to do is message us today and tell us the details!