The eighth-most populous country in the world, Bangladesh boasts a population of more than 170 million, over 98% of whom speak Bengali as their native language. It may surprise you to learn, then, that Bangladesh is home to an estimated 36 indigenous languages, spanning four different language families. In some cases, the line between “language” and “dialect” becomes blurred—debates rage as to whether Chittagonian, Rangpuri, and Sylheti are dialects of Bengali or fully fledged languages. For the purposes of our translation services, we’re categorizing the tongue as a language.
Independent language or not, Sylheti is spoken by roughly 10 million people as their mother tongue, with an additional 1.5 million or so people learning it as a second language. The language is known by numerous monikers—Sylhetti, Sylheti Bangla, Sileti, Siloti, Syloti, and Syloty are all alternative names. However, Sylheti is under threat of language shift to Bengali, as some people see Sylheti as a “corrupted” version of Bengali. At TranslationServices.com, we proudly support Sylheti and its millions of native speakers with our new Sylheti translation services.
Would you like to take advantage of our Sylheti translation services? Ask about a free quote today!
Sylheti: the language of northeastern Bangladesh
While Sylheti is primarily concentrated in Bangladesh’s northeastern Sylheti Division, from which it derives its name, you’ll also find native speakers in the Barak Valley, the southernmost division of the Indian state of Assam, as well as some northern areas of Tripura, also in India. The UK also houses a large Sylheti-speaking community, large enough that the Sylheti influence overpowers that of Bengali. Like many other languages in Bangladesh and northern India, Sylheti comes from the Indo–Aryan branch of the Indo–European language family, meaning it’s technically—albeit very distantly—related to English.
Sylheti shares around 50% of its lexicon with Bengali, and the overall grammar and structure also exhibit broad similarities. Sylheti nouns inflect for four cases—nominative, objective, genitive, and locative—with different conjugations for singular and plural nouns. In the plural, Sylheti also makes a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. The language also features measure words that are used with numbers and words like “many”—while most nouns just take the generic -ţa, there are also others used for specific types of nouns, such as -zôn, used exclusively with humans. To navigate all the intricacies of Sylheti, it’s necessary to rely on skilled, native-speaking translators—and that’s what we offer.
Your best bet for high-quality Sylheti translation services
Our Sylheti translation team is big, diverse, and passionate, comprised of native Sylheti speakers with experience translating to and from their proud language. Our team members come from all over the Sylheti-speaking world, whether that’s the Sylheti Division in Bangladesh, Assam or Tripura in India, or the Sylheti-speaking community in the UK or elsewhere in the Sylheti diaspora. Whatever kind of Sylheti translation services you’re looking for, we’re equipped to provide translation both to and from Sylheti.
We’ve made sure to hire experts in different areas of translation to ensure a well-rounded offering of Sylheti translation services. So, if you want academic translation services, for example—maybe for a research paper or conference speech—you can work with our academic translators, who cover a wide range of subjects. If you’re looking for business translation, we also have a business translation team, which is ideal for both internal documents like business plans and customer-facing documents like press releases or white papers. Anyone looking for literary translation services can also find what they’re seeking with us—whether you want to translate Sylheti poems into English or English novels into Sylheti, our literary translators are eager to help you.
Providing Sylheti translation services is our passion. Ready to get started? The first step is sending us a message.