There are a lot of different languages spoken in India—nearly 450, to be precise. Many are Indo–Aryan languages, like Hindi or Punjabi, and many others are Dravidian languages, like Tamil or Telugu. But India is home to indigenous languages from other language families as well—notably the Sino–Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. It’s the Austroasiatic family from which the Mundari language hails, spoken by the Munda peoples in the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, Odisha, and West.
Like many of India’s minority languages, Mundari is classified as endangered, spoken by between 750,000 to 1,750,000 people. This disadvantageous position has resulted in an overwhelming lack of professional translation services for Mundari, since most translation companies don’t work with endangered or minority languages. But at TranslationServices.com, we do. Working in translation is about more than just profit—it’s about appreciating the linguistic diversity of the world and doing our part to help struggling languages thrive. That’s why we’re so proud to present our Mundari translation services.
Would you like a free quote for professional Mundari translation? Contact us now and ask about yours.
An Austroasiatic language in the middle of India: Mundari
Most Austroasiatic languages are spread across Southeast Asia, the biggest two being Vietnamese and Khmer. Mundari and the other Munda languages are the farthest west of all Austroasiatic languages, located smack dab on the Indian subcontinent. The Munda languages are traditionally considered quite distinct from their relatives in Southeast Asia. Mundari is written in the Mundari Bani script specifically designed for the language in the 1980s—before that, speakers used the Devanagari, Odia, Bengali, and Latin scripts.
Unlike most European languages, Mundari distinguishes between not two but three numbers. That means it has a singular form, a dual form, and a plural form. Also, unlike many other Austroasiatic languages, including Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon, which have essentially no inflection, Mundari is an agglutinative language with verbal and nominative inflection, using suffixes (and auxiliaries) to indicate verbal tense. Mundari also makes a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, with deities and natural phenomena like rain, thunder, and lightning considered animate. Another feature is clusivity in the first-person plural pronoun, meaning there are two words for “we,” depending on whether the listener is included.
Mundari is a unique and culturally rich language that our Mundari translation team is proud to work with.
Let’s translate to and from Mundari!
Our Mundari translators work hard to ensure clear, accurate translations to and from Mundari. We can translate historical documents in any of the historical scripts the language used to be written in, and we can translate academic notes, stories, or other texts in the contemporary Mundari Bani script. We can translate English materials into Mundari to aid businesses catering to the group, researchers handing out questionnaires to Mundari speakers, and language revitalizationists translating books, websites, apps, and more into the language. Our Mundari translators are here for any Mundari translation project.
We’re eager to get started on your Mundari translation project. Message us now to set the process in motion.