Russia is not a monolingual country. Russian is indeed the only language with official status everywhere in the geographically massive country, but all across the land are indigenous peoples who still speak their indigenous languages—most of which are dramatically different from Russian. One of the more common language families spoken indigenously in Russia is the Uralic family, with Hill Mari belonging to this family.
Hill Mari was spoken by around 23,000 people in 2010, down from roughly 37,000 in 2002. In this way, Hill Mari is following the same trend as many of its fellow indigenous languages in Russia, as the ubiquity and prestige of Russian threatens these regional minority languages. Despite having official status in Mari El and being used as a language of instruction in some elementary and secondary schools, Hill Mari struggles to retain its vitality and is classified as an endangered language. At TranslationServices.com, we believe this is a tragedy—Hill Mari, alongside Russia’s other indigenous languages, are culturally valuable and deserve to thrive. That’s why we proudly present our Hill Mari translation team.
Free quotes for Hill Mari translation services are available if you simply message us and ask for one.
What is the Hill Mari language like?
The majority of Hill Mari speakers reside in the Gornomariysky, Yurinsky, and Kilemarsky districts of the Mari El Republic in Russia. Like most indigenous languages of Russia, it’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet. It belongs to the Mari branch of the Uralic language family, bearing a close resemblance to Meadow Mari, which is another co-official language in Mari El. Hill Mari’s nature as a Uralic language also means it’s a grammatically complex agglutinative language that uses an abundance of suffixes to change the meanings of words.
Hill Mari features 10 distinct cases and uses suffixes to denote possession, with six such suffixes to cover three persons in both singular and plural forms. The basic word order of the language is subject-object-verb, distinguishing it from its distant cousin Finnish. However, like Finnish, Hill Mari expresses negation through a “negative verb” that undergoes conjugation for person and number. In Hill Mari, this negative verb comes in several forms: indicative present, imperative present, desiderative present (i.e., a mood that expresses desire), and indicative first preterite (i.e., past tense).
No one said Hill Mari was a simple language. But in the eyes of our Hill Mari translators, the language’s complexity is just another reason to love it—and love translating it.
Flexibility in our Hill Mari translation services
Since each client has different needs, it’s important that we as a translation agency offer flexible services that accommodate each client’s unique specifications. This includes both translation from Hill Mari to English—such as for historical documents or traditional literature in Hill Mari to help speakers share their culture abroad—as well as translation from English to Hill Mari—which works wonders to increase the amount of educational material, books, websites, games, poems, apps, and more in Hill Mari. Both directions help promote awareness of and appreciation for Hill Mari culture and access to high-quality content in Hill Mari, paving the path for stronger vitality for Hill Mari in the future.
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