British Columbia is one of the most linguistically diverse parts of Canada. You’re probably thinking that’s because of the high immigrant population in Vancouver and the surrounding areas, where you can regularly encounter Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Tagalog, Korean, and more, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. No, we mean the original languages of Canada, the ones spoken for thousands of years before Europeans ever came to the continent. We mean the indigenous languages, such as Lillooet.
Around 580 people were recorded as native Lillooet speakers by the 2021 Canadian census, but the majority of them were over 60 years old, placing the language at serious risk of extinction. Indeed, most indigenous languages in British Columbia are severely endangered. However, language revitalization efforts are underway to increase the number of Lillooet speakers, including through a language nest program, where older native speakers teach the language to children in a variety of settings. We at TranslationServices.com are passionate about doing our part to support Lillooet, and that’s why we’ve launched our own Lillooet translation team.
We’d love to show you a free quote for our Lillooet translation services—just ask for one now!
Discovering the proud Canadian indigenous language of Lillooet
Lillooet is spoken in southern British Columbia, alongside a wealth of other indigenous languages, in the communities of Mount Currie, Fountain, Pavilion, and Lillooet around the Fraser and Lillooet Rivers. To native speakers, the language is known as St̓át̓imcets, Sƛ̓aƛ̓imxǝc, Ucwalmícwts, or Lil̓wat7úlmec, depending on the orthography and dialect. Indeed, there are two primary varieties of the language: Upper or Northern St̓át̓imcets and Lower or Southern St̓át̓imcets. If the names look intimidating, that’s just par for the course in Salishan languages, a major indigenous language family of the Pacific Northwest.
Lillooet is also complicated grammatically, which can make it difficult to translate. Its default word order is verb-subject-object, but the subject can come before the verb in certain cases. The language exhibits a great deal of inflection, replete with not only prefixes and suffixes but also infixes, which are inserted into the middle of a word. Lillooet also makes heavy use of reduplication, reduplicating the first part of a noun to indicate plural, reduplicating the last part of a verb to denote an ongoing action, and even reduplicating consonants in the middle of a noun to signify a smaller or cuter version of the noun. If you want to ensure that your Lillooet translation accurately handles all the complex nuances of the language, you need to work with native-speaking translators—and that’s who we hire.
We’re your ultimate solution for Lillooet translation services.
Finding reliable translation services for Lillooet is hard. That’s why we’re so proud to present our new Lillooet translation team, filled with passionate translators who love to use their knowledge of their native language to help others. On our team are translators from the different communities that speak Lillooet—Mount Currie, Fountain, Pavilion, and Lillooet—and they represent both the dialects of Upper/Northern St̓át̓imcets and Lower/Southern St̓át̓imcets. With translation services available both to and from Lillooet, we’re flexible in our translation offering.
Our Lillooet translators would love to help you with various types of projects, spanning different domains of use. Of course, with the number of Lillooet speakers being so limited, it might not always be possible to accommodate special requests, but still, we strive to provide a wide range of Lillooet translation services. For example, we can translate educational materials for children (a prime avenue for language revitalization), documents for organizations working with Lillooet-speaking communities, and modern-day creative works—including books, poems, apps, websites, games, and more—that can help speakers and learners alike enjoy the language in more contexts.
Now is a great time to get started with your Lillooet translation project. Just reach out to us to start the discussion!