Looking at a map, it can be easy to think there are only a few dozen languages spoken around the world. But when you look more closely, you’ll find the reality couldn’t be any more different. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken today, although many are endangered or minority languages that most people haven’t heard of. India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries, clocking it at close to 450 languages. One of them is Mandeali, which is spoken in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
Mandeali is considered one of India’s “highly endangered languages” by UNESCO, although the language still has over 600,000 speakers. Unfortunately, India’s minority languages tend to be overshadowed by the country’s bigger languages—in the case of Himachal Pradesh, where Mandeali is spoken, that’s Hindi. For this reason, most translation agencies just focus on Hindi and other major languages—but at TranslationServices.com, we cater to endangered languages like Mandeali as well. That’s because we recognize the value of languages like Mandeali and want to see them thrive.
How about checking out a free quote for our Mandeali translation services today?
Mandeali: a unique northern Indian language
Mandeali is spoken by the Mandyali people in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, particularly in the city of Mandi in the Mandi district. It is sometimes grouped together with other regional languages like Kangri and Pahari or Himachali. For political reasons, it is also sometimes classified as a dialect of Hindi, despite having low mutual intelligibility with Hindi. Mandeali is usually written in Devanagari, which is also used for Hindi, but historically, it was written in its own script, Mandiali Takri. Efforts to revitalize the Takri script are underway.
Though Mandeali is an Indo–European language, like English, its grammar is entirely different from English. It’s a verb-final language, with a word order of subject-object-verb, and it uses postpositions, not prepositions, meaning it places such words after the noun. Mandeali also features ergative–absolutive alignment, which it shares with many other Indo–Aryan languages. In an ergative language, the subject of an intransitive verb (e.g., “I walk”) behaves in the same way as the object of an intransitive verb (e.g., “He sees me.”). If we tried replicating this in English, “I walk” would stay the same, but “He sees me” might become something like “Him sees I.”
Clearly, then, Mandeali isn’t a simple language, and translating it is no simple job—but our Mandeali translators are proud to translate to and from their precious language.
Discovering the reasons for a Mandeali translation
Our team is lined with Mandeali translators ready to translate both to and from their language, so we can easily accommodate just about anyone’s needs. Historians might be interested in having historical documents translated—we can work with both the Devanagari and Mandiali Takri scripts. Our team can also translate traditional Mandeali literature or folklore to help spread Mandeali culture. On the flip side, we’re happy to translate various documents into Mandeali, from questionnaires for academics conducting research to entertainment content like books, websites, and apps. Translation projects like these increase the domain of use for Mandeali and help the language flourish for generations to come.
If you’re looking for Mandeali translation services, what are you waiting for? Reach out today and discuss the details with us.