The country of Russia is massive—in terms of area, it’s the largest country in the world. Most people in Russia speak Russian, since it’s the sole official language at the federal level and is necessary to communicate with people from other parts of the country. But Russian certainly isn’t indigenous to all parts of the country. For example, in one part of the Far East region of Russia, indigenous people speak a Turkic language called Yakut.
Yakut is one of the northernmost Turkic languages, far away from Turkish, which is by far the biggest member of the Turkic language family. With around 450,000 native speakers, Yakut is one of the bigger indigenous languages in Russia and is spoken by the majority of the Yakut ethnic population. Yakut is even used in media, schools, and administrative contexts where Yakut speakers are most concentrated. However, many Yakut speakers are also bilingual in Russian, and the widespread use of Russian in the region contributes to Yakut’s status as a “vulnerable” language. Thus, professional translation services for the language are limited, and that’s where TranslationServices.com comes in: we’re proud to present our Yakut translation team.
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Yakut: a Turkic language in Russia’s Far East
Yakut, sometimes called Sakha, is primarily spoken in the Republic of Yakutia, also known as Sakha, but Yakut speakers can also be found in neighboring regions like Magadan Oblast, Amur Oblast, and Evenkia in Krasnoyarsk Krai. The language is similar to most other indigenous languages in Russia in that it’s written in the Cyrillic script, although it was written in the Latin alphabet for around 20 years in the early 20th century. Yakut exhibits lexical differences from its Turkic cousins, with a large number of Mongolian-derived vocabulary and many words of unclear origin.
Being a Turkic language, Yakut has no grammatical gender but does undergo significant inflection by gluing together series of affixes to stem words. To adhere to the Turkic concept of vowel harmony, most Yakut suffixes come in multiple forms, and the consonants and vowels that proceed the suffix determine which one to use. To this end, Yakut has an overwhelming 16 different forms of its plural suffix. Yakut pronouns also differentiate between human and non-human, but not gender, in the third person.
The Yakut language is very dear to our native-speaking translators, who are passionate about translating to and from Yakut despite the linguistic challenges.
Yakut translation services that fit your needs
We’ve built our Yakut translation team with the many different potential needs of our clients in mind. We can translate both to Yakut and from Yakut for a wide variety of needs—so reach out to us if you’d like English translations of Yakut-language historical documents, literature, academic content, or anything else. We can help you share your thoughts and your Yakut culture with outsiders. At the same time, we invite you to get in touch if you want Yakut translations of English-language business material, educational content, books, games, websites, and more. We’re passionate about producing Yakut-language content to help preserve this beautiful language.
Don’t waste time—get started on your Yakut translation project today by sending us a message.