What’s the most linguistically diverse region of the world? At the country level, Papua New Guinea has the highest number of distinct languages. But at a more local level, the Caucasus region, and particularly Dagestan, emerges as one of the most linguistically diverse areas on Earth. With more than 12 official languages and plenty of other non-official languages, Dagestan takes the cake for linguistic diversity in Russia. One of Dagestan’s languages—one of the official ones—is Aghul.
Aghul is spoken by 30,000 people in southeastern Dagestan, and as with most languages with only a few tens of thousands of speakers, it’s considered an endangered language. The biggest threat is Russian, which is the lingua franca for interethnic communication in Dagestan and Russia more broadly. As the influence of Russian grows, the tendency of Aghul people to abandon their ancestral language increases. At TranslationServices.com, we think that’s a tragedy, and we don’t want to see the Aghul language disappear. So, we’ve decided to put together an Aghul translation team to help the Aghul people safeguard their language.
Why not reach out and request a free quote for Aghul translation services today?
What kind of language is Aghul?
Aghul speakers mostly live in the Agulsky District in southern Dagestan, which is located in southwestern Russia, at the bottom of the Northern Caucasus region, bordering the nearby countries of Georgia and Azerbaijan. Aghul, like most other languages indigenous to modern-day Russia, uses the Cyrillic alphabet, albeit with some added characters to accommodate the language’s phonology. Aghul comes from the Northeast Caucasian language family and the Lezgian branch more specifically, making it related to nearby languages like Lezgian, Tabasaran, Rutul, and Tsakhur.
One of the key characteristics of Northeast Caucasian languages is their ergative–absolutive alignment, which can be a tricky concept for English speakers. Essentially, ergative languages focus on who or what is affected by an action rather than who or what is performing an action, like English. To this end, ergative languages, including Aghul, mark intransitive subjects and transitive objects identically and transitive subjects differently. In Aghul, the former case (absolutive) is unmarked, while the latter (ergative) is. All other cases in Aghul (which features a whopping 28 cases) include the ergative suffix before their own. Aghul verbs are also complex, displaying a high degree of inflection.
Don’t balk at the complexity of Aghul—our Aghul translators have been speaking the language since childhood and are passionate about translating it.
We’re ready to translate to and from Aghul.
We have some clients looking for translation from Aghul to English and others seeking translation from English to Aghul. No matter which side of the equation you stand on, our Aghul translation team is equipped to help. So, why not reach out to our translation team with Aghul literature, notes, or historical documents? We can help you spread them to your target audience. Or, why not contact our team to translate educational content, books, websites, apps, poetry, or games into Aghul? We can create smooth, crisp, natural-sounding Aghul translations that give Aghul speakers and learners alike more opportunities to use the language.
Our Aghul translation services are remarkably flexible—so no matter what you need, just reach out!