Alaska has always been one of the most unique U.S. states, given that it’s detached from the continental United States and is nestled squarely to the northwest of Canada, separated from Russia’s Far East region by the Bering Strait. The state is home to a number of Native American languages entirely different from those encountered throughout the rest of the country—Alaska’s indigenous languages are mostly from the Na–Dene and Eskimo–Aleut language families. Iñupiaq, Alaska’s second-most widely spoken indigenous language, comes from the latter family.
While Iñupiaq boasts the title of “second biggest indigenous language in Alaska,” that doesn’t mean it has a lot of speakers. There are only around 2000 to 3000 speakers of the language, amounting to around 10% of the ethnic Iñupiaq population. Since most speakers are older than 40, Iñupiaq is an endangered language, and that means there aren’t a lot of translation teams for the language. TranslationServices.com is proud to step in and offer high-quality Iñupiaq translation services, however.
Don’t hesitate to message us and ask about a free quote for Iñupiaq translation services today.
Understanding the background of Iñupiaq
Iñupiaq is part of the Eskimo–Aleut language family, which accounts for the majority of languages spoken in the northernmost areas of Canada and the United States, Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula, and Greenland. Iñupiaq is closely related to Inuktitut in Canada and Greenlandic but exhibits mutual unintelligibility nonetheless. The boarding school system heavily repressed the Iñupiaq people, leading to a dramatic decline in Iñupiaq speakers, but nowadays, revitalization work is underway to teach the language to children and preserve it for the future.
Like other Inuit languages, Iñupiaq is a remarkably complex language that uses a great deal of inflection to express grammatical information. Iñupiaq speakers can build incredibly long words that include much more information than could ever be conveyed by a single English word—sometimes, a single word can make up a full sentence. Iñupiaq distinguishes not only between singular and plural but also dual, and it uses nine cases to denote grammatical relationships. Iñupiaq is an ergative–absolutive language, which means it uses one marker for nouns affected by an action (intransitive subjects and transitive objects) and a different marker for those doing an action (transitive sentences), so two of the cases are ergative and absolutive—the remaining seven are oblique cases that express ideas like motion and location.
We can accommodate all your Iñupiaq translation needs.
Learners struggle to pick up Iñupiaq—indeed, it’s a complicated language. But don’t worry—our Iñupiaq translators can handle Iñupiaq as smoothly as you can navigate your native language. That’s because they’re native Iñupiaq speakers passionate about their language and ready to help clients translate both into and out of Iñupiaq. This means nearly anything is fair game, whether you have historical documents or traditional stories in Iñupiaq that you want to translate for non-Iñupiaq speakers, or whether you’re looking to translate questionnaires, books, educational content, games, apps, or anything else into Iñupiaq, allowing speakers and learners alike more access to great content in the language.
We’re confident we can help you with your Iñupiaq translation project. Get in touch today to discuss your needs.