Algeria is the world’s second-largest Arabic-speaking country by population, accounting for roughly 40 million of the world’s native Arabic speakers. What you may not realize is that that leaves around 5 million Algerians who don’t speak Arabic as their first language. Arabic was brought to the region in the 8th century, but before that, the land we know as Algeria today was dominated by speakers of the indigenous Berber languages—who, 13 centuries later, still speak their native languages in large numbers. One of the Berber languages in Algeria is Shawiya.
Shawiya (sometimes called Shawiya Berber, and sometimes spelled Chaouïa) is estimated to have 2.6 million native speakers as of 2022, although the figure could be as low as 1.4 million or as high as 3 million. Historically, Shawiya was generally unwritten and not taught at schools, so Shawiya speakers used Arabic—and sometimes even French or English—for such purposes. But recently, Shawiya has gained prominence thanks to Berber cultural and political movements in the country, and it’s high time that Shawiya translation services were made more accessible, too. That’s where we at TranslationServices.com and our new Shawiya translation team come in.
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A deep dive into Algeria’s indigenous Shawiya language
Algeria is a big country, but most of the population is concentrated along the littoral northern regions—and the same is true of the indigenous Shawiya people. Specifically, Shawiya speakers primarily inhabit the Aurès Mountains, living in cities like Batna, Khenchela, Oum El Bouaghi, Souk Ahras, Tébessa, and Biskra. Some Shawiya speakers even live across the border in western Tunisia. Shawiya is closely related to Shenwa, another Berber language spoken in central Algeria by some 75,000 people. It’s also related, albeit much more distantly, to Arabic, as both hail from the Afroasiatic language family.
Zooming in on the grammatical makeup, Shawiya doesn’t have a single dominant word order, with both subject-verb-object (like English) and verb-subject-object (like Classical Arabic) common. Like in French, adjectives are placed after the noun, but unlike French, demonstratives (words like “this” and “that”) also come after the noun. Numerals, however, come before the noun. To show possession of a noun, Shawiya directly appends a possessive suffix to the noun—while not found in English, this is a common strategy among the world’s languages. However, Shawiya’s stark differences from English can make translation tricky, and that’s why it’s crucial to work with dedicated Shawiya translators like ours if you want high-quality translation services.
We accommodate your specific requests for Shawiya translation services
As Shawiya gains increasingly more recognition in Algeria, we’re eager to help our clients from across North Africa and the rest of the world access Shawiya translation services that cater to their individual needs. To ensure broad coverage of the language’s dialects, we’ve hired a diverse roster of translators from all over the Aurès Mountains, and if you’re looking for a specific dialect, all you need to do is tell us. If you want translation from English to Shawiya, we can do that, and if you’re looking for translation from Shawiya to English, we can handle that, too. We work with both the Latin script and the native Tifinagh script.
Some of our Shawiya translators are specialized in more niche areas of translation, such as academic translation, business translation, and literary translation. So, if you’re looking to translate a research survey, press release, novel, or something else that requires the expert care of a specialist, just let us know. The same applies if you’re seeking a Shawiya translator with expertise in a certain field. With a team as diverse as ours, we’ll often have the right Shawiya translator to meet your needs.
Send us a message now if you want to place your first order for Shawiya translation services!