How many languages are spoken in Russia? Across the geographically largest country in the world, a plethora of different ethnic groups speak between 100 to 150 unique languages, and one of the most linguistically diverse parts of the country is the North Caucasus region. The Caucasus is home to three distinct language families—Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, and Kartvelian—and several unique languages. One of them is Adyghe, part of the Northwest Caucasian language family.
Adyghe is classified as a vulnerable language due to the heavy influence of Russian, Turkish, and Arabic in the areas where it’s spoken. Although the language is native to the Russia’s Republic of Adygea and the neighboring federal subject, Krasnodar Krai, many modern-day Adyghe speakers also live in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Israel, where their ancestors fled after the historical country of Circassia was taken over by the Russian Empire in the 1800s. This leaves Adyghe vulnerable to extinction and thus unappealing to most translation agencies. TranslationServices.com is different—we know Adyghe is a valuable language and are committed to providing high-quality translation services for it.
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Learning more about Adyghe
Adyghe, which is spoken by roughly 300,000 people today, comes from the Northwest Caucasian language family, making it related to neighbors like Abkhaz and Kabardian. It’s usually written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is also used for Russian, but historically it was written in the Arabic script and briefly in the Latin alphabet. It is an ergative language, like other Northwest Caucasian languages, which means it focuses on the actor affected by an action, treating intransitive subjects and transitive objects the same, rather than on the actor performing an action, as English does.
While many ergative languages don’t mark the absolutive argument (i.e., the actor affected by the action), Adyghe does. The ergative case is the same as the oblique case, which means Adyghe speakers have to rely on word order and context to some degree to understand the grammatical relationships in a sentence. Verbs in Adyghe are heavily inflected, as in other Northwest Caucasian languages, and always come at the end of the sentence, after the subject and object. The language features 11 verb tenses, five moods, and five prefixed cases that alter the nuance of the verb.
Adyghe isn’t a simple language, and our translators know that. However, they’re dedicated to providing the best possible Adyghe translation services, which they can easily provide as native speakers.
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There are many reasons you may want Adyghe translation services. Perhaps you’re a historian with old Adyghe-language documents written in the Arabic script, and you want to understand what they say. Maybe you’re an Adyghe speaker passionate about your language and culture, and you want to share traditional Adyghe literature with the rest of the world. You could be a researcher looking to learn more about the Adyghe people and their culture, and you want a questionnaire in Adyghe to survey people most comfortably. Or perhaps you’re a language activist looking to translate books, games, websites, apps, and educational content into Adyghe to help Adyghe ensure its vitality and make it easier for learners to pick up the language. Our Adyghe translation team is ready to help in all these scenarios.
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