Arabic (unsurprisingly) originated in the Arabian Peninsula, and from there, it’s spread across the Middle East, North Africa, and even some parts of sub-Saharan Africa. In many parts of northern sub-Saharan Africa, it’s an important lingua franca or trade language with a heavy influence on local populations and languages. That’s certainly true in South Sudan, where Arabic is reportedly the most widely spoken language in the country. But the Arabic in South Sudan isn’t what you’d hear on the streets of Saudi Arabia—South Sudan has its own flavor of the language, known as Juba Arabic.
Juba Arabic functions primarily as a lingua franca, so it has few native speakers, clocking in at just 250,000 as of 2020. However, it’s widely learned as a second language, amassing some 1.2 million second-language speakers as of 2019. It’s a creole language derived from Sudanese Arabic, developed from the descendants of Sudanese soldiers, and has relatively recently started being passed down to children as a native language. Despite being the most spoken language in South Sudan, the government discourages its use, making the language potentially vulnerable. We at TranslationServices.com are proud to support the language with our new Juba Arabic translation services.
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Juba Arabic: South Sudan’s special brand of Arabic
Juba Arabic is, unsurprisingly, spoken in South Sudan’s southern Juba region, where the capital city, also called Juba, lies. It’s spoken throughout the country, but some other major South Sudanese cities, notably Malakal and Wau, speak Sudanese Arabic rather than Juba Arabic. Since it’s a creole language rather than a proper Arabic variety, Juba Arabic is by far the hardest variety for speakers of other Arabic languages to understand, making it its own unique language.
Juba Arabic’s grammar is vastly simplified compared to other varieties of Arabic, which is typical for a creole or pidgin language. It’s also incorporated influences from various languages indigenous to South Sudan, which predominantly hail from the Nilo–Saharan language family, completely unrelated to Arabic. Juba Arabic lacks the grammatical gender distinctions of Arabic proper, and it also lacks articles, whereas conventional Arabic varieties make heavy use of the definite article (i.e., the equivalent of “the”). Since Juba Arabic is, in many ways, incomprehensible to speakers of other Arabic varieties, hiring a Modern Standard Arabic translator for your Juba Arabic translation job just won’t do—which is why we’ve put together a dedicated Juba Arabic translation team.
A robust Juba Arabic translation team that caters to your individual needs
Whether you’re from South Sudan or anywhere else in the world, we want to help you access the Juba Arabic translation services you need. Our translators have grown up all over Juba and elsewhere in South Sudan as either native speakers or highly proficient second-language speakers and can offer high quality and reliability in their translations, whether they’re translating from English to Juba Arabic or from Juba Arabic to English.
Is your text academic in nature—perhaps a research survey or an interview transcript for a study? Is it a business document, maybe for internal use, like a financial report, or outward-facing to attract customers, such as a press release or ad copy? Is it a creative work, such as a novel, poem, short story, script, or something similar? Whatever your project is, our Juba Arabic translators are here to help. We have team members who specialize in academic translation, others in business translation, and yet others in literary translation. Many of our translators also have some expertise in other fields, so if your text contains technical vocabulary, just let us know!
We’d love to help you with your Juba Arabic translation project. Why not get in touch today to discuss what we can do for you?