Even though Africa is home to more than two thousand indigenous languages, most are poorly known outside of the continent. Globally, one of the best-known—and only-known—indigenous African languages is Swahili, used widely in parts of East Africa as a language of interethnic communication. While native speakers of Swahili number only around 5.3 million, the language boasts roughly 83 million second-language speakers. But there’s a closely related language—or dialect, depending on how you classify it—that’s often overlooked, and that’s Bajuni.
Bajuni is spoken by nearly all of the 100,000 or so ethnic Bajuni (Wabajuni) people. It’s closely related to Swahili, considered a dialect by some, but it lacks the prestige that Swahili boasts—in fact, throughout history, the Bajuni people have faced displacement and discrimination. Facing a terror campaign of robberies, the demolishment of homes, and the burning of crops in the 1960s, the Bajuni people who had historically lived along the coast fled to nearby islands—the Bajuni Islands. We at TranslationServices.com want to support Bajuni—which is why we’ve launched our own Bajuni translation services.
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Bajuni: the little-known Swahili dialect
Bajuni, which is also sometimes called Tikulu, is native to Kenya and Somalia. In Somalia, it’s primarily spoken in the Bajuni Islands, whereas the Kenyan Bajuni live along the coast. Small numbers of Bajuni speakers also live in mainland Somalia, where they constitute an ethnic minority and may face discrimination. Bajuni contrasts with the general linguistic landscape of Somalia, where predominantly Afroasiatic languages are spoken, but it fits in well in Kenya, where many fellow Niger–Congo languages abound.
Bajuni’s grammar is highly similar to that of Swahili, which is a tricky language for English speakers. The word order is subject-verb-object, like English—that much is straightforward. But Bajuni incorporates more than a dozen noun classes that function similarly to grammatical gender in languages like French or Spanish, with each class featuring its own prefixes that must be appended to nouns, adjectives, verbs, possessives, and more. Verbs are also heavily inflected, marking both the subject and object as well as the tense, aspect, and mood. Adjectives, demonstratives (e.g., “this” or “that”), and even numerals all come after the noun, all of which are modified for the given noun class. Naturally, this complicated grammatical structure can make Bajuni difficult to translate, but that’s why you should work with native-speaking Bajuni translators, like ours.
We’re ready to tackle your Bajuni translation project.
While it’s not hard to find translation services for Swahili, translation agencies that cater specifically to Bajuni are much harder to come across. We aim to make Bajuni translation services more accessible, hiring passionate, native-speaking Bajuni translators from different areas of Somalia and Kenya. Whether you’re looking for translation from English to Bajuni or from Bajuni to English, we can help—our skilled translators provide translation services in both directions.
If you want general Bajuni translation services, we can certainly help with that, but we can also assist if you’re looking for more niche translation services. Some of our Bajuni translators are skilled in academic translation, able to work with clients in diverse fields, while others on our team are well versed in business translation, providing high-quality translation services for businesspeople in a range of industries. Yet more translators on our Bajuni team cater to those in the creative sector, translating everything from books and poems to apps and websites. We work with all kinds of projects and all sorts of subject matters, and if you have any requests, you can just let us know.
For high-quality and carefully tailored Bajuni translation services, reach out today with a message—let’s discuss how our Bajuni translators can help you.