India isn’t the most linguistically diverse country in the world (that honor goes to Papua New Guinea), but it’s not far off. Coming in fourth place with a whopping 450 or so languages, India is a plethora of ethnolinguistic diversity, with hundreds of ethnic groups coexisting with different languages. So, it’s certainly not true that everyone in India speaks Hindi—in fact, Hindi is mostly only spoken in the north-central area of the country, in a wide region surrounding New Delhi. Southern India largely speaks Dravidian languages like Tamil and Telugu, while various languages can be found in northern India.
One of northern India’s major languages is Kashmiri, which boasts about 7 million native speakers. Though that may be a far cry from Hindi’s 322-odd native speakers, it’s enough to make Kashmiri one of India’s biggest languages and even earn it a designation as one of the country’s 22 scheduled languages. It’s also one of five official languages in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, with nearly all speakers concentrated in Kashmir. Professional translation services for Kashmiri are rare, but here at TranslationServices.com, we’re proud to introduce our Kashmiri translation services.
If you’re eager to see our rates for Kashmiri translation, why not reach out and ask for a free quote?
Discovering Kashmiri, a unique northern Indian language
Though Kashmiri is an Indo–European language like Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, and other major Indian languages (and English), it boasts several features that render it unique. For one thing, it used to be written in its own unique script, called the Sharada script, which today is only used liturgically. Both Devanagari and the Arabic script are used today, with the Arabic script the officially designated script for Kashmiri.
Two notable grammatical features of Kashmiri are its split-ergativity alignment and its verb-second word order. Ergative languages treat the subject of intransitive sentences and the object of transitive sentences grammatically identically, instead of consistently treating the subjects identically, as in English, and split-ergative languages only apply this paradigm some of the time. Kashmiri use of ergative alignment only in the past tense makes it unique, although split-ergativity is also found in Hindi and other major Indian languages. Verb-second word order dictates that the verb must come in the second position, regardless of where other words are, and is almost exclusively found in Germanic languages like German, Swedish, and Icelandic.
Whatever you need translated to or from Kashmiri, we’re here to help you.
We’re pleased to say that we’ve put together a passionate team of talented Kashmiri translators who have all the skills to translate both into and out of the language, so we’re confident we can help you no matter what you need translated. Historical documents—even those written in Sharada? No problem! We’d also be happy to translate corporate, academic, literary, liturgical, and other Kashmiri texts so you can share them with the world or communicate with outsiders.
Of course, we can also translate English content into Kashmiri if you want to connect with people in Kashmir. For companies, we can translate marketing materials sure to attract the attention of Kashmiri speakers. For content creators, we’d love to translate your books, poems, games, websites, apps, and more, making them easily accessible to Kashmiri speakers and helping you spread your hard work to new areas.
If you want Kashmiri translation services, don’t wait—send us a message today with the details of your project!