There’s a world of difference between Turkish and Turkic languages. Turkish is indeed the biggest member of the Turkic language family, one of the world’s biggest language families. Turkic languages cover a vast area, from the Anatolian peninsula (i.e., Turkey) throughout Central Asia to Russia’s Far East region. One of these Turkic languages—one spoken in southern Siberia—is Khakas.
The total number of Khakas speakers is estimated at 42,000, accounting for roughly 57% of the entire Khakas ethnic population. Since the majority of Khakas speakers live in Russia, the language is threatened by the widespread use and prestige of Russian in the region, with urban Khakas people rapidly abandoning their ancestral language in favor of Russian. However, a positive attitude toward the language is spurring revitalization efforts among the urban population. We at TranslationServices.com are passionate about language revitalization and would like to do our part for Khakas by establishing a dedicated Khakas translation team for translation services both to and from Khakas.
A free quote for Khakas translation services? You can get one from us simply by asking!
A quick introduction to Khakas
The homeland of the Khakas people is Khakassia, an autonomous republic in the southern Siberian region of Russia. There are number of Khakas dialects—Sagay, Kacha, Koybal, Beltir, and Kyzyl—with the distinct Fuyü Gïrgïs dialect spoken by a small community in northern China. Khakas was not a literary language until the Russian Revolution of 1917, when a Cyrillic alphabet was first developed for the language, which was then replaced by a Latin orthography, only to be replaced again by a Cyrillic system 10 years later.
Khakas is a member of the Turkic language family related to nearby indigenous languages like Altai. Being a Turkic language, Khakas has no grammatical gender and is highly agglutinative, adding suffixes to the ends of nouns and verbs to alter their meanings. It places the verb at the end of sentences (subject-object-verb word order) and inflects words according to vowel harmony, meaning that each affix has multiple forms depending on the sounds in the stem word. Khakas also uses an attributizing suffix to transform nouns and locative and temporal phrases into adjectives. Adding a possessive affix to an attributized adjective turns it back into a noun that then takes additional inflection, making Khakas a rare language with “inner inflection.”
Khakas is hardly an easy language—both we and our Khakas translators understand that. But that makes us all the more determined to provide high-quality Khakas translation services.
Decide what kind of Khakas translation services you want!
We’re all about flexibility here at TranslationServices.com. We proudly offer translation both into Khakas and out of it, allowing you to obtain the translation services you need. If you have an old document in Khakas (Latin or Cyrillic script), we can translate it into English. We’re happy to translate Khakas literature as well, so you can share it with non-Khakas speakers. Regarding English-to-Khakas translation services, our team would be delighted to translate educational materials into Khakas to facilitate the teaching of children in the Khakas language. We’re also passionate about translating content like books, websites, apps, and games into Khakas, as this can help revitalize the language by giving speakers and learners more avenues to use it.
Our team is ready to get started on your Khakas translation. Just message us today to begin.