All over Russia are indigenous communities whose cultures and languages are nothing like Russian—indeed, such a phenomenon is all but inevitable when a country stretches over a territory as large as Russia. Most people in Russia speak Russian, because it’s necessary to talk to people from outside their local communities. But that doesn’t mean that indigenous peoples of Russia aren’t proud of their ancestral languages. One of Russia’s many indigenous groups is the Nenets people, who speak the Nenets language.
Nenets has around 23,000 speakers in total, split between its two key dialects, Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets. Nenets has official status in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and people of all ages still speak the language natively, although fewer children are learning it—leaving UNESCO to classify Tundra Nenets as “definitely endangered” and Forest Nenets as “severely endangered.” Most Nenets people also speak Russian, which puts enormous pressure on their language. Unfortunately, most translation firms won’t work with languages in such circumstances, but TranslationServices.com is different. We care about the vitality of the Nenets language, which is why we’re proudly presenting our Nenets translation services today.
Why not check out the prices for our Nenets translation services by requesting a free quote today?
Nenets: the biggest Samoyedic language
Nenets comes from the Uralic language family, so it’s (distantly) related to Finnish, Hungarian, and numerous indigenous languages in Russia, such as Karelian and Udmurt. Nenets occupies the Samoyedic branch of the language family, however, and it’s by far the biggest language of this grouping. Nenets speakers mostly live in the far north of Russia, specifically in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Krasnoyarsk Krai, and the Komi Republic. Most Nenets speakers speak Tundra Nenets (21,500), with only around 1500 speaking Forest Nenets.
Nenets stays true to its Uralic roots by gluing numerous suffixes to words in an agglutinative process. The language declines nouns for three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), six cases, and possession. Nenets verbs aren’t any simpler—the language features 16 verbal moods and four tenses: past, future, habitual, and future-in-the-past. Nenets speakers add more nuance to sentences through an exclamatory clitic, indicating surprise or excitement, and several particles that can convey uncertainty, possibility, and doubt, among other things. The default word order of Nenets is subject-object-verb.
Nenets is a complex language, and translating it is complicated—but our Nenets translators are proud to take on the task.
Nenets translation services designed to be flexible
We want to help you with your Nenets translation needs, no matter what your project is. Are you looking to translate historical Nenets-language materials into English? Or, perhaps, would you like to share traditional Nenets stories with audiences abroad? Our team would be delighted to translate these into English. Alternatively, you could be looking to translate pedagogical material into Nenets to support local teachers with educating Nenets children in their native language. Or you may want to translate content such as books, games, poetry, websites, and apps into Nenets to increase the amount of material available in the language, giving speakers more opportunities to use it and learners more ways to learn it.
We’re ready to take on your Nenets translation project. Just reach out to us and tell us all the details so we can get started!