It’s an understatement to say that Southeast Asia is linguistically diverse. Languages from various families abound all across the region, with Maritime Southeast Asia particularly rich in indigenous tongues. In fact, Indonesia has the second-biggest number of languages in the world, behind only Papua New Guinea. While countries like Indonesia and the Philippines use lingua francas like Indonesian and Tagalog to tie the country together at the national level, at home, people often speak smaller regional languages—like Sangir.
More than 170,000 people are native speakers of Sangir, giving the language a vibrant, healthy speaker community. Some Sangirese people speak Talaud, another indigenous language, as their mother tongue, but Sangir has far more speakers. However, split between the countries of Indonesia and the Philippines, Sangir is threatened by both Indonesian and Tagalog, as well as local languages like Manado Malay, Minahasan, and Cebuano. But that’s not a problem for us at TranslationServices.com, who are proud to introduce our new Sangir translation services.
For a free quote for our Sangir translation services, message us now!
Sangir: the language that connects Indonesia and the Philippines
The Sangirese people are native to the Sangir Islands, an island chain in between Indonesia and the Philippines. While the majority of Sangir speakers live in Indonesian, those in the northernmost parts of the island chain are citizens of the Philippines. In Indonesia, most Sangir speakers live in North Sulawesi, with a minority residing in Gorontalo. In the Philippines, most Sangirese people can be found across the Davao region in Davao del Sur, Davao Occidental, and Davao Oriental.
Sangir belongs to the Austronesian language family, like most other languages spoken across Indonesia and the Philippines. But even though the majority of Sangir speakers hold Indonesian citizenship, their language is classified in the Philippine branch of the Austronesian family. The language has also been significantly influenced by languages from entirely different families—specifically Spanish and Ternate, a West Papuan language—which makes it unique in the diverse linguistic landscape of Indonesia. Sangir also exhibits features that are common throughout Philippine languages but that feel quite foreign to speakers of European languages, such as a clusivity distinction in the first-person plural pronoun. Sangir has multiple first-person plural pronouns depending on whether the listener is included, which allows for more nuance than in English. To properly translate to and from Sangir, you need an experienced professional—and our team is made up of experienced, native-speaking Sangir translators.
You can customize your Sangir translation services to your liking
While most translation agencies just entirely overlook Sangir, we at TranslationServices.com are committed to bringing you the highest-quality Sangir translation services we possibly can. We’ve hired our Sangir translators from all over the Sangir Islands, including both Indonesia and the Philippines, so we cover all the dialects this language has to offer. Our translators are experienced and passionate, eager to translate both to and from their native Sangir.
We offer tailored translation services for projects of all kinds. Since we have specialists in various types of translation, we can cater to clients looking for academic translation, business translation, literary translation, and more. Maybe you’re conducting research in the Sangir Islands and you need to communicate with the locals, or maybe you run a company and are looking to establish a presence in a Sangir-speaking locale. Maybe you want to share great Sangir-language literature with people around the globe, or maybe you want to promote the Sangir language by translating books, poems, movies, and educational materials into the language. We even have Sangir translators who are experts in other area, enabling them to navigate technical language—so just let us know what you’re looking for, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.
It's a great time to place an order for Sangir translation services now!