The Uralic language family—which includes Finnish and Hungarian—traces its origins back to the Ural Mountains, which today demarcate the boundary between European and Asian Russia. Many Uralic language speakers have since migrated north- and westward, but the majority of Uralic languages remain in modern-day Russia, particularly in the northwest of the country. Among the various Uralic languages still spoken in Russia is Moksha, with around 130,000 native speakers even today.
Despite being located in Russia, Moksha remains the majority language in the west of the Republic of Mordovia. However, the language is nonetheless threatened by Russian, which is much more widely spoken and more prestigious. Russian is necessary for communication with fellow Russian compatriots from other areas, and the usage of Moksha in administrative settings is limited. The reality is that Moksha is an endangered language, and unfortunately, there aren’t many translation companies that work with endangered languages. TranslationServices.com is one of the few—and we’re more than proud to present our Moksha translation team.
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Discovering the Uralic identity of the Republic of Mordovia
The Republic of Mordovia is an autonomous Russian republic located in the Volga region in European Russia. Ethnic Mordvins, who make up around 40% of the population, speak the Mordvinic languages of Moksha and Ezrya. Once considered a single language, Moksha and Erzya are now considered separate languages due to their mutual intelligibility, although Erzya remains Moksha’s closest relative. Moksha, like most other indigenous languages in Russia, is written in the Cyrillic alphabet—a Latin orthography was also developed but never implemented.
Being a Uralic language, Moksha has no grammatical gender but does feature a convoluted system of case-marking and conjugation. Moksha presents speakers with 13 different cases, many of which are locative, expressing ideas that English would convey through prepositions. The language also features rare cases like the comparative case, which denotes a likeness to the respective noun, and a causal case, used to express that the noun is the cause of something. Despite the vast case system, however, Moksha also uses a lot of postpositions. Additionally, the language exhibits double-marking to show possession, meaning that both the possessor noun and the possessed noun take a possessive suffix.
Our Moksha translators realize how complicated Moksha is, but they’re dedicated to providing high-quality translation services for their language.
Let us translate to and from Moksha for you.
Our team stands ready to accommodate your Moksha translation needs, whether that means translating into Moksha or out of Moksha. Indeed, translating from Moksha to English is valuable for historians and Moksha speakers passionate about their culture who want to share Moksha historical documents, literature, or other writings in the Uralic language. Simultaneously, our team is here to help translate from English to Moksha, which is great for researchers who need questionnaires in Moksha, teachers who need educational content in Moksha, or language activists who want books, poems, games, websites, apps, and more in Moksha. Since all such translation projects help legitimize, revitalize, and preserve the precious Moksha language, our translators always work passionately.
If you have a Moksha translation project, just reach out and tell us the details today—we’ll get started right away.