You might think that Spanish and Portuguese dominate Latin America linguistically, and if you’re only talking about the number of speakers, you’re right. The vast majority of people in most Latin American countries use Spanish (or, in Brazil, Portuguese) as their native language, but in fact, there are hundreds more languages hidden beneath the surface in Latin American societies. We’re talking about the indigenous languages that developed on the land over thousands of years and are still spoken today—such as Guahibo.
Today, Guahibo is spoken by an estimated 34,000 native speakers, roughly 40% of whom are monolingual. That’s notable for an Amerindian language, since the indigenous peoples of the Americas tend to speak the majority languages of their countries, even if they retain their heritage language. Thus, Guahibo stands on stronger footing than many of the other indigenous languages in South America—but it remains endangered, threatened by the prestige and ubiquity of Spanish. At TranslationServices.com, we support the Guahibo-speaking community with our dedicated Guahibo translation services.
If you’d like a free quote for our Guahibo translation services, you need but ask.
An introduction to the unique Guahibo language
So, where will you find Guahibo speakers? They’re indigenous to the Llanos, a tropical grassland plain found in eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela. The majority of Guahibo people live in Colombia, however. The language, which may also be referred to as Guahiban, Wahívoan, or Guahiboan, consists of three main dialects: Sikuani, Amorua, and Tigrero. Ultimately, it comes from a small language family with which it shares a name, and that’s the Guajiboan family.
Guahibo’s relatives are other, smaller indigenous languages in the Llanos, namely Guayabero, Macaguane, and Cuiva. Like Guahibo, these languages have also resisted Spanish assimilation and boast a relatively high proportion of monoglots. Grammatically, Guahibo exhibits a subject-object-verb word order, the most common word order in the world, and uses postpositions instead of prepositions, which means these small grammatical words come after the noun. Yes-or-no questions differ from statements only through intonation, although content questions have an explicit question phrase at the beginning of the sentence. Colors in Guahibo can also get tricky, as the language merges blue and green into a single word, which can make translation tricky. So, if you want the highest-quality Guahibo translations for your project, it’s imperative to work with native-speaking translators like ours.
We translate all kinds of texts to and from Guahibo.
No matter what your Guahibo translation project entails, we’re here to help. Our team consists of Guahibo native speakers from different Guahibo-speaking regions of Colombia and Venezuela, encapsulating the various dialects used by the Guahibo people. We make translation services both from English to Guahibo and from Guahibo to English available so that people on either side of the Guahibo–English language gap can access the services they need. Our translators are passionate, eager to work on all sorts of projects.
If you need a specialist in a particular translation domain for your Guahibo translation project, just let us know. Our team is diverse, so we may just have the right translator whose expertise is tailored to your needs. For example, some of our translators are well suited to academic translation services, whether it’s research surveys, educational content for kids, or technical subject matter in a particular field. We also have translators who are trained for business translation, helping companies and organizations market their goods and services to the Guahibo speakers of Colombia and Venezuela. And then there are our literary translators, the perfect solution for anyone wishing to share the stories of the Guahibo with the world or broaden the body of literary work available in the language by translating books, poems, stories, and more into the Amerindian language.
We can’t wait to help you with your Guahibo translation project. Place an order today!