South Africa is well known for its linguistic diversity, and the country makes an effort to recognize and preserve the languages spoken natively within its borders, featuring a whopping 11 official languages. The most widely spoken native languages in South Africa are Zulu, Xhosa, and Afrikaans, but the country’s smaller languages still boast large numbers of speakers. Venda, coming in 10th in terms of number of speakers, accounts for around 2.4% of South Africa’s population, which still makes it an important language in the diverse southern African country.
Venda today is spoken by around 1.3 million native speakers in South Africa, with an additional 1.7 million or so people speaking it as a second language. While most speakers reside in South Africa, a minority language community also exists in neighboring Zimbabwe. Venda may be the second smallest of South Africa’s 11 official languages, but with around 3 million speakers in total, it’s still a major language. However, most translation agencies overlook this African language, opting instead to serve bigger languages like Afrikaans. We at TranslationServices.com don’t believe in leaving languages like Venda behind—so we created our own Venda translation team.
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What is Venda like as a language?
Most of Venda’s speakers are located in the northeastern corner of South Africa, specifically in the province of Limpopo. The neighboring province of Gauteng is home to around 275,000 speakers of the language. The language may also be referred to by its native name, Tshivenda, and it belongs to the Bantu subfamily of the Niger–Congo language family, closely related to Kalanga, which is spoken across the border in Zimbabwe and Botswana.
Being a Bantu language, Venda is characterized by an extreme preference for prefixing (as opposed to suffixing) and an extensive system of noun classes. Each noun class comes with its own prefix that marks the noun, and each class uses a different prefix for the plural form. These prefixes are also attached to words that modify the noun, such as adjectives, demonstratives, and verbs. As an agglutinative language, inflection in Venda is usually straightforward, but the sheer number of affixes can be dizzying, particularly in verbs. Venda verbs are marked not only for subject and object but also tense, aspect, and mood, among others.
We’re excited to translate to and from Venda for you.
We’ve gone to great lengths to track down the best Venda translators in South Africa and Zimbabwe, ensuring a high-quality Venda translation for you each time. Since our translators represent a diverse range of skills, we’re also able to accommodate a wide array of Venda translation needs. In terms of translating into Venda, we can help you translate promotional materials to advertise your business or organization in Limpopo or Gauteng, pedagogical materials that encourage Venda-language education among native Venda youth, and books, apps, websites, games, and other content that enriches the lives of Venda speakers. In terms of translating from Venda, we offer our translation services for all kinds of business, academic, and literary works, as well as historical documents written in Venda.
Are you ready to start your Venda translation journey? Take the first step today by reaching out to us.