Today, English is the dominant language in the United States, with Spanish boasting considerable influence in the southern portion of the country. But these languages aren’t native to the land. The indigenous languages of the United States number in the hundreds and are still spoken by proud communities today, although indigenous languages of the US face struggles for continued vitality. Among the indigenous languages still spoken in the US today, we find Tewa.
With approximately 1,600 native speakers, Tewa stands as one of the larger Amerindian languages in the US. While the language is classified by UNESCO as “definitely endangered,” it maintains a healthier speaker base than some other Native American languages, with revitalization efforts ongoing since the 1980s. The vast majority of Tewa speakers are bilingual in English, which further threatens the language—but at TranslationServices.com, we’re proud to support the community with dedicated Tewa translation services.
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Tewa: diving deeper into the details
You’ll find most Tewa speakers in New Mexico and Arizona, with the majority living in New Mexico. The Tewa people primarily live in Nambé Pueblo, Pojoaque Pueblo, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara Pueblo, and Tesuque Pueblo, found in the Santa Fe and Rio Arriba counties of New Mexico, as well as the village of Hano in Arizona. For most of its history, Tewa was unwritten, as it was traditionally believed that the language should exist only in oral form, but nowadays, many Tewa speakers have decided that writing the language is an important way to ensure its continued vitality into the future.
Tewa belongs to the Tanoan language family, related to Kiowa and other Pueblo languages like Jemez and Tiwa. Its basic word order is subject-object-verb, which is the most common word order among languages. The precise order can change based on Tewa’s noun hierarchy, whereby animate nouns are positioned before inanimate nouns, but this feature is slowly being lost in the speech of younger Tewa speakers because Tewa marks the subject morphologically, allowing sentences to retain an obvious meaning no matter what order the nouns are in. Tewa divides nouns into three numbers—singular, dual, and plural—but depending on the class of a noun, the distinction may fall away, with one class combining the dual and plural forms, another the singular and dual forms, and the final class combining the singular and plural forms. It takes a native-speaking Tewa expert to seamlessly translate to and from this tricky language, but luckily, our team is filled with native Tewa speakers.
A Tewa translation team fit for any project
We’ve hired native-speaking Tewa translators from the various pueblos that span the Tewa-speaking world, which allows us to offer pinpoint translation services for different dialects of Tewa. What ties our translators together is their love for their language, and they believe that high-quality translation services will help preserve the Tewa language into the future, which is why they pour their heart and soul into their translation work. We offer translation services both to and from Tewa, although we recognize that the amount of existing literature in Tewa is limited.
Our Tewa translators are trained in different domains and can provide varied translation services to serve a range of specific needs. For example, you may wish to translate educational materials—on any subject—to Tewa to help children not only acquire literacy in the language but also gain an education. Or you may want to translate media—be that books, short stories, games, apps, or anything else—to Tewa to boost the language’s status and body of written work. Whatever you need Tewa translation services for, you can count on our passionate team.
Why not reach out today to place an order for our Tewa translation services?