There are a lot of languages spoken in South Sudan—around 70, to be precise. Around 60 of them are indigenous to the country, with the majority of South Sudan’s 12 million inhabitants speaking one of these languages as their first. The country has designated English as its official language, but that’s common in Africa—the population just learns it as a second language. Of course, English is worlds apart from the native languages, like Nuer, Bari, Dinka, Zande, or Murle, the latter of which is our newest translation offering.
Murle—which may also be called Ajibba, Beir, Merule, Mourle, or Murule—had some 200,000 native speakers in 2017, which includes most ethnically Murle people, although not all. The future vitality of the language is threatened not only by the power and ubiquity of English, South Sudan’s sole official language, but also the ethnic violence that occurs between the Murle and their neighbors, including the Dinka and the Nuer, who are much larger in number. Finding translation services for Murle is a challenge, but with TranslationServices.com, it’s much easier: we’re thrilled to introduce our new Murle translation team.
Anyone interested in a free quote for our Murle translation services need only message us and ask!
Murle: a minority language among minority languages
Murle is native to eastern South Sudan, with nearly all speakers found in the Greater Pibor Administrative Area, with a few thousand speakers also residing across the border in southwestern Ethiopia. Murle is highly similar in culture to its neighbors, the Dinka and the Nuer, but the languages are quite different, and with the Murle only numbering a tiny fraction of the combined population of the Dinka and the Nuer, the political situation is often stacked against them. The Murle language is on the Surmic branch of the Nilo–Saharan language family, with Dinka and Nuer found on the Nilotic branch instead.
Murle is a complex language that uses a default verb-subject-object word order, which is common among Nilo–Saharan languages. Instead of prepositions, Murle uses postpositions (placing them after the noun), which is rare for verb-subject-object languages. These postpositions can also be inflected to mark the person. Verbs are similarly marked for subject and sometimes also object. Forming the plural can be extremely tricky in Murle, with no one dominant suffix or strategy used, and sometimes the plural is even formed by eliminating the final consonant of a word. It’s a tricky language, for sure, which is why you should work with native-speaking Murle translators (like ours) for your Murle translation projects.
Murle translation services customized to meet your needs
We’ve carefully selected our Murle translators to accommodate a wide range of client needs, including coverage of different dialects, such as Boma, Olam (Ngalam), and Lotilla. Our Murle translators come from all over the Greater Pibor Administrative Area, accounting for regional variations. Whether you’re looking to translate to or from Murle (our team works in both directions), you can count on our team to handle any special requests you may have.
To the best of our ability, we try to provide comprehensive Murle translation services that cover a range of translation domains, including academic translation, business translation, and literary translation services. It’s not always possible to fulfill niche requests, but whatever your needs are, we’ll work hard to match you with the most suitable Murle translator on our team. Our academic translators work with research questionnaires and lesson materials for local kids; our business translators handle internal documents like business plans or financial reports as well as marketing collateral like press releases and ad copy; our literary translators expertly transform novels, short stories, poems, and more to and from Murle. For esoteric language, just talk to us—we’ll see if we can set you up with a Murle translator who knows your field.
If you’re ready to get started with Murle translation services, contact us today!