Did you know that a whopping 700+ languages are spoken in Indonesia? That’s right—while Indonesian is the national language and is used as a lingua franca to connect different ethnic groups across the country, most people in Indonesia don’t speak it as a native language. Instead, the various ethnic groups that populate the country tend to speak their ancestral languages, giving way to one of the most linguistically diverse countries on the planet. Among Indonesia’s many languages is Buginese, which is one of the biggest ones.
With 4 million speakers, Buginese may not sound like a terribly large language, but for an indigenous language of Indonesia, that’s huge. Given the sheer number of languages spoken in Indonesia, most have remarkably few speakers. Buginese’s figure of 4 million speakers includes around 3.5 million native speakers and 500,000 second-language speakers—the presence of a relatively high number of second-language speakers is a testimony to Buginese’s relative prominence. But that doesn’t mean finding translation services for Buginese is easy—in fact, it can be quite difficult. That’s why we at TranslationServices.com have taken it upon ourselves to build our own Buginese translation team.
A price estimate for your Buginese translation project—for free? That’s right—just contact us for yours.
Learn about Buginese, the biggest indigenous language in Sulawesi
The primary Buginese-speaking area is found in South Sulawesi, a province on the island of Sulawesi, but pockets of Buginese-speaking communities can be found all across Sulawesi. In addition, Buginese speakers may be found on other major Indonesian islands, such as Sumatra, Borneo, Maluku, and Papua. Today, Buginese is generally written in the Latin alphabet, as are many Indonesian languages, but traditionally, it was written in the Lontara script, used in southwestern Sulawesi. Buginese comes from the same language family as Indonesian—Malayo–Polynesian—but features stark differences.
Buginese word order is not fixed, with various combinations possible, but the most common is verb-object-subject, a feature it shares with only 3% of global languages. In Buginese, gendered articles are used with names to indicate the person’s gender, and a definite suffix can be attached to nouns to provide the same nuance as English “the.” Verbs conjugate for both the subject and object, using ergative alignment, and the comparative form of adjectives can be achieved through partial reduplication.
Buginese is a complicated language—there’s no denying that. But our Buginese translators are passionate about their language, and they’re eager to offer Buginese translation services.
Flexible translations between English and Buginese
We’ve carefully put together our Buginese team with the goal of translation both into Buginese and out of Buginese. By selecting a diverse group of experienced Buginese translators, we ensure we can cover a huge array of translation needs—even if you want to translate, for example, historical Buginese documents or literature written in the Lontara script. We can, of course, also translate contemporary Buginese literature, business documents, academic papers, and more into natural-sounding English. At the same time, our team can help with translation into Buginese for business content, pedagogical material, questionnaires, books, games, poems, websites, apps, and more. We’re passionate about creating high-quality content in Buginese because that can help encourage use of the Buginese language and ensure its vitality remains strong despite incursion from the more widely spoken Indonesian language.
We need to know the details of your Buginese translation project to get started—so send us a message with your wishes!