Did you know that Canada is home to almost 100 indigenous languages? That’s right—even though English and French dominate daily life all across Canada, dozens of indigenous languages are still spoken today, some vigorously, by hundreds of thousands of people. Given the massive geographical area that Canada stretches over, it’s only natural that the country is home to languages from many different families—but the Algonquian family stands out as particularly prominent, accounting for many of the indigenous languages in eastern and central Canada.
Cree and Ojibwe are the two biggest Algonquian languages, both used today by more than 50,000 native speakers. Both are spoken over large geographical areas, which has allowed numerous dialects in both languages to develop over a continuum. Oji-Cree is a dialect—or language, as some may classify it—that stands between Cree and Ojibwe, which are closely related. With most of its grammar coming from Ojibwe, Oji-Cre is usually classified as an Ojibwe dialect, and it boasts more than 13,000 speakers, making it one of Canada’s biggest indigenous languages. Sadly, though, Oji-Cree, and the many other Ojibwe dialects, are endangered and receive little attention from translation firms. At TranslationServices.com, we’re trying to change this with our new Oji-Cree translation team.
It’s easy to see how much your Oji-Cree translation project will cost—just send us a message to request a free quote!
Dive deeper into Oji-Cree with us!
An important language on the border between Ojibwe and Cree, Oji-Cree is alternatively known as Severn Ojibwe, less commonly as Northern Ojibwe, or as its native name, Anishininiimowin. It’s native to northern Ontario and the Island Lake area of Manitoba. Though undoubtedly closer to Ojibwe than Cree, Oji-Cree has sustained considerable influence from Cree, particularly in terms of vocabulary but also in terms of morphological grammar.
Oji-Cree is a proud member of the Algonquian language family, along with Cree and Mi’kmaq. Algonquian languages feature grammar far more complex than the uninitiated English speaker can wrap their head around, and Oji-Cree is no exception. For one thing, word order in Oji-Cree is quite free—while English maintains a strict word order to establish grammatical relationships between words, the grammar in Oji-Cree is so complex that these relationships are encoded onto words through inflection, meaning the word order doesn’t matter that much. A typical Oji-Cree sentence will place the verb first, however. When you add a pervasive grammatical distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, Oji-Cree grammar gets even more complex.
We’re ready to tackle your Oji-Cree translation project—whatever it may be.
It’s hard enough to find translation services just for Ojibwe—if you’re looking for Oji-Cree translation services specifically, the quest gets that much harder. But at TranslationServices.com, we’re passionate about linguistic diversity, and we understand the value that each Ojibwe dialect inherently holds. This is what pushed us to form our Oji-Cree translation team, comprised of passionate, native-speaking translators from Ontario and Manitoba who are eager to help you translate into or out of Oji-Cree.
When you only have a speaker community of 13,000 people, you can’t necessarily cater to niche translation needs—but that hasn’t stopped us from hiring diverse translators who can accommodate a wide range of projects. We have on our team Oji-Cree translators with business knowledge, so if you’re looking to translate business documents or promotional materials, they’re well suited for the job. We also have translators with a deep familiarity of literature and the art of literary translation, so if you want to translate traditional Oji-Cree stories into English—or English-language content like books, games, apps, or poems into Oji-Cree—you can trust our team to deliver a high-quality translation. If you’d like your translator to be an expert in a particular field, we may be able to arrange that, as well—just let us know the discipline you’re targeting.
We aim to provide flexible, high-quality Oji-Cree translation services you can rely on. Why not get started today by sending us a message?