The island of Sulawesi—one of the major islands of Indonesia—boasts a population of around 20 million people and a whopping 114 languages, giving the island a high degree of linguistic diversity. Of course, people in Sulawesi tend to learn the national lingua franca of Indonesian to communicate with people outside of their ethnic group, but locally, various indigenous languages are spoken vigorously. Among Sulawesi’s many native languages we find Tolaki, not to be confused with the related Taloki language.
Around 330,000 people speak Tolaki as their native language, so while the language is much smaller than major Sulawesi tongues like Buginese or Makassarese, it’s nonetheless a major language on the island. Most Tolaki speakers are bilingual in Indonesian, and although speakers harbor great pride for their language, with local elementary schools offering Tolaki classes, they often choose to speak Indonesian among themselves. In rural areas, Tolaki use remains vigorous, but the language is nonetheless endangered. We at TranslationServices.com are passionate about minority languages like Tolaki, which is why we’re so proud to roll out our new Tolaki translation team.
Anyone who would like to see our rates for Tolaki translation services can contact us and ask for a free quote!
Tolaki: a proud but endangered language of Sulawesi
Tolaki speakers live in the southeastern peninsula of Sulawesi, with the language characterized by two primary dialects. One is Konawe, also called “rough language” by speakers, and with around 230,000 native speakers, it constitutes the bigger variety by a huge margin. The other is Mekongga (“soft language”), and though it’s the smaller dialect, it’s considered the prestige variety. Like almost every other language in Sulawesi, Tolaki belongs to the massive Austronesian language family, specifically inhabiting the Celebic branch.
While Tolaki is related to major Indonesian languages like Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese, the relation is only distant, and the language exhibits a wide range of features distinguishing it from languages in western Indonesia. Tolaki uses a basic word order of verb-subject-object, which is common among Austronesian languages, although Malayic languages often use subject-verb-object. Tolaki also conjugates verbs for tense and aspect, which Indonesian does not. There’s more inflection in Tolaki in general than in Malayic languages, in fact, which sometimes even takes the form of infixes (i.e., affixes added in the middle of a root word, instead of at the beginning or end, like prefixes and suffixes). The increased grammatical complexity of Tolaki presents challenges to translators, but not to worry—our Tolaki team consists of native-speaking translators who can easily weather these challenges.
Offering you the Tolaki translation services you want
No two translation clients are the same. Accordingly, we aim to provide a diverse range of Tolaki translation services that cater to your individual needs as much as possible. Our translation services are available for both Konawe and Mekongga, and we’ve sourced our translators from all over the Tolaki-speaking region of Sulawesi, which means we can home in on geographically specific versions of the language. Whether you’re seeking translation services to Tolaki or from Tolaki, you can rely on our multifaceted team.
We cater to more than just dialect, geographical region, and translation direction, however. If your translation project requires specialized translation services, such as academic translation, business translation, or literary translation, you can count on our Tolaki translation team to help. And we can even translate technical documents with esoteric language—all you have to do is let us know what field you’re working in so that we can match you with the right Tolaki translator for the job. Whatever you need, we’ll do our best to provide it.
If you’d like to see what our Tolaki translation team can do for you, take a moment to place an order now!