Russian geography is complicated. Russia is by far the largest country on the planet, stretching over vast portions of land that are certainly not indigenous to the ethnic Russian people. While Russian is the official language and people around the country must learn it to speak to those in other regions, several dozen minority communities exist around Russia, still speaking their indigenous languages. Linguistic diversity is particularly strong in the North Caucasus region, where a number of indigenous languages from various language families are spoken. One of these languages—one of the more prominent ones—is Kumyk.
Today, Kumyk is spoken by roughly 450,000 native speakers in the southwestern Russian region of the North Caucasus. The language boasts a rich history, having been recognized as one of the six literary languages of Dagestan and having held lingua franca status in the North Caucasus until the 1930s, despite being a Turkic language and not from the Northwest Caucasian or Northeast Caucasian language families. Given the pressure from Russian, modern-day Kumyk is vulnerable, and unlike most translation firms, which are primarily concerned with profits, we at TranslationServices.com care about Kumyk’s vitality—so we set up a Kumyk translation team.
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Kumyk: the Turkic former lingua franca of the North Caucasus
The majority of Kumyk’s 450,000-odd speakers live in the central coastal region of the Republic of Dagestan, located in Russia’s North Caucasus region, but Kumyk speakers can also be found in neighboring Chechnya and North Ossetia, as well as small communities in Turkey. Historically, Kumyks wrote in the Arabic script, transitioning to the Latin alphabet in 1929 and then to the Cyrillic alphabet, which is still used today, in 1938.
Kumyk comes from the Turkic language family, one of the many language families spoken natively in the Caucasus. The word order in Kumyk, as in all Turkic languages, is subject-object-verb, and the language expresses grammatical relationships through affixes in a process called agglutination. Like in other Turkic languages, these affixes—whether noun cases, verbal conjugation markers, plural markers, or anything else—come in multiple forms to account for vowel harmony, as certain types of vowels cannot appear in the same word. Kumyk has a unique pronoun system that includes six distinct third-person pronouns, making lots of room for nuance.
As native speakers of Kumyk, our translators are passionate about their language and love translating between Kumyk and English for diverse clients.
Our Kumyk translation services come in many different forms.
Are you looking for translation from Kumyk to English or from English to Kumyk? In either case, our team is ready to help you. Our Kumyk translators are specialized in various types of translation, so they’re able to translate just about any content you might have. Historical Kumyk documents written in the Arabic script? Treasured Kumyk literature? Personal notes in Kumyk? Our team can handle it all. Regarding English-to-Kumyk translation, we can translate business material to accommodate a Kumyk-speaking clientele, surveys and questionnaires for researchers and governmental agencies, entertainment content like books, poetry, games, websites, and apps, and more—we’re passionate about creating more content in Kumyk to help the language thrive into the future.
Don’t wait to get started with Kumyk translation services—contact us today.