
Most people are surprised to learn that there are more than 7000 languages spoken around the world. Most of these languages have few speakers, with many threatened with imminent extinction. Many others still enjoy vigorous or semi-vigorous use but are minority languages, overshadowed by larger national languages or lingua francas. Most of the languages in Indonesia, the world’s second-most linguistically diverse country, fall into one of these categories, such as Muna.
Muna, with 300,000 speakers as of 2007, is one of these languages. Despite being related to Indonesian, Muna is entirely different from Indonesia’s national language, with its own grammar and vocabulary making it unique. Unfortunately, Muna’s vitality may not last. As more and more speakers shift to Indonesian and give up their ancestral language, Muna may not be around for many future generations, and revitalization efforts are imperative to preserving the language. We at TranslationServices.com want to help the Muna people preserve their language to the extent that we can, which has inspired us to launch a professional Muna translation service.
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Introducing you to the Muna language
Speakers of Muna can primarily be found on the island of Muna, named after the Muna people and language, and the adjacent northwestern portion of Buton Island. Muna is divided up into three dialects, one of which is the standardized version of the language—the other two are Tiworo and Southern Muna. The main differences among the dialects are in vocabulary. Muna comes from the Celebic branch of the Malayo–Polynesian languages and is related to various other minority languages spoken on Muna and Buton Islands. In terms of the writing system, Muna uses the Latin alphabet, in line with most other Indonesian languages.
Muna presents a complicated system of inflection in its verbs, with obligatory person and mood markers. Markers indicating the subject come in the form of prefixes, while object markers are expressed through suffixes. These markers represent a wide variety of grammatical persons, including honorific and familiar forms for the second person. There are three classes of personal verbal affixes, with each divided into realis and irrealis categories, allowing Muna speakers to sometimes express tense just through a person marker. One of the classes implies volition or intentionality on the part of the person, while another denotes a lack of intentionality.
You don’t have to worry about the labyrinth of nuances in Muna because our translators are passionate native speakers.
We offer Muna translation services the way you want them.
No matter what kind of document you want us to translate to or from Muna, we’re dedicated to exceeding your expectations. That’s why we’ve staffed our team with top-notch translators experienced in different types of translation. This even includes historical documents that use now-archaic language or literary works in Muna that employ flowery prose—we’ll capture all the nuances in English to the best of our ability. On the flip side, we’d love to help you translate questionnaires or surveys into Muna to obtain research insights or statistics, or books, websites, apps, poems, games, and more into Muna to promote vigorous use of the language among adult and youth speakers alike.
Providing flexibility and quality in our Muna translation services is our mission. If you want to get started, just send us a message!