Dinka language

This article is about the language, for the ethnic group see Dinka.

Dinka
Thuɔŋjäŋ
Pronunciation	/t̪uɔŋ.ɟa̤ŋ/
Spoken in	South Sudan and neighboring areas
Region	Sudan
Ethnicity	Dinka people
Native speakers	2–3 million  (date missing)
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Eastern Sudanic Nilotic Western Nilotic Dinka–Nuer Dinka
Writing system	Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-2	din
ISO 639-3	din – Macrolanguage individual codes: dip – Northeastern Dinka (Padang) diw – Northwestern Dinka (Ruweng) dib – South Central Dinka (Agar) dks – Southeastern Dinka (Bor, Twic / Tuic) dik – Southwestern Dinka (Rek)
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Dinka, or Thuɔŋjäŋ, is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are five main varieties, Ngok, Rek, Agaar, Twic / Tuic East, and Bor, which are distinct enough to require separate literary standards and thus to be considered separate languages. Jaang or Jieng is used as a general term to cover all Dinka languages. The Malual dialect (Aweil) is the prestige dialect.

The closest non-Dinka language is Nuer, the language of the Dinka's traditional rivals. The Luo languages are also closely related.

The Dinka are found mainly along the Nile, specifically the west bank of the White Nile, a major tributary flowing north from Uganda, north and south of the Sudd marsh in southwestern and south central Sudan in three provinces: Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile, and Southern Kurdufan.

Linguistic features

See also: Dinka alphabet

Phonology

Dinka has a rich vowel system, with at least thirteen phonemically contrastive vowels. The underdots ([◌̤]) indicate "breathy" vowels, represented in Dinka orthography by diaereses (⟨◌̈⟩):

	Front		Back
	plain	breathy	plain	breathy
Close	i	i̤	u
Close-mid	e	e̤	o	o̤
Open-mid	ɛ	ɛ̤	ɔ	ɔ̤
Open			a	a̤

There may be other distinctions. The Dinka southeastern dialect is known to contrast modal voice, breathy voice, faucalized voice, and harsh voice in its vowels, in addition to its three tones. The ad hoc diacritics employed in the literature are a subscript double quotation mark for faucalized voice, [a͈], and an underline for harsh voice, [a].^[1] Examples are,

Voice	modal	breathy	harsh	faucalized
Bor Dinka	tɕìt̪	tɕì̤t̪	tɕìt̪	tɕì͈t̪
	diarrhea	go ahead	scorpions	to swallow

There are twenty consonant phonemes:

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n̪	n	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	p   b	t̪   d̪	t   d	c   ɟ	k   ɡ
Fricative					ɣ
Rhotic			ɾ
Approximant			l	j	w

Morphology

This language exhibits vowel ablaut or apophony, the change of internal vowels (compare English goose/geese):

Singular	Plural	gloss	vowel alternation
dom	dum	'field/fields'	(o-u)
kat	kɛt	'frame/frames'	(a-ɛ)

(Bauer 2003:35)

Tones

Dinka is a tonal language.

Dialects of Dinka

Linguists divide Dinka into five main dialect clusters corresponding to their geographic location with respect to each other:

• Northeastern and western (Padang Dialects): Abiliang, Nyiël, Dongjol, Luäc, Ngok Lual Yak, Ageer, Rut, Thoi, Alor, Ngók Deng Kuol, Panaru and Paweny.
• South Central (Agar Dialects): Aliap, Ciëc, Atuöt, Gok and Agar
• Southeastern (Southeastern Dinka Dialects): Bor,Hol,Nyaarweng and Twïc
• Southwestern (Rek Dialects): Rek, Abiëm, Aguók, Apuk, Awan, Kuac, Lóu, Luäc/Luänyjang, Malual (Malualgiėrnyang), Paliët, Paliëupiny, Twïc

See Ethnologue online map of Sudan for locations of dialects.

Writing Dinka

Main article: Dinka alphabet

Dinka is written with a Latin-based alphabet. There have been variants since the early 20th century, but the current alphabet is: a ä b c d dh e ë ɛ ɛ̈ g ɣ i ï j k l m n nh ny ŋ t th u w o ö ɔ ɔ̈ p r y

However, some of the above letters can be written in other ways (or other letters can be used in their places) but the letters/special characters used are still being pronounced as the original letters that they represent. These are:

Original Letter	other ways to write it
ɛ	ė  ("e" with a dot on top.)
ɣ	h, x, q
ŋ	ng
ɔ	ȯ  ("O" with a dot on top.)

See also

• Dinka people
• Nilo-Saharan languages

References

1. ^ Edmondson, Jerold A.; John H. Esling (2005). The valves of the throat and their functioning in tone, vocal register, and stress: laryngoscopic case studies. 

Other resources

• Andersen T. (1987). "The phonemic system of Agar Dinka". Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 9, 1–27.
• Andersen T. (1990). "Vowel length in Western Nilotic languages". Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22, 5–26.
• Andersen T. (1991). "Subject and topic in Dinka". Studies in Language 15, 265–294.
• Andersen T. (1993). "Vowel quality alternation in Dinka verb inflection". Phonology 10, 1–42.
• Beltrame, G. (1870). Grammatica della lingua denka. Firenze: G. Civelli.
• Deng, Makwei Mabioor (2010). Piööcku Thuoŋjäŋ: The Elementary Modern Standard Dinka (Multilingual Edition), Xlibris, ISBN 1450052401.
• Malou, Job. (1988) Dinka Vowel System. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics. ISBN 0-88312-008-9.
• Mitterrutzner, J. C. (1866). Die Dinka-Sprache in Central-Afrika; Kurze Grammatik, Text und Worterbuch. Brixen: A. Weger.
• Nebel, A. (1979). Dinka–English, English–Dinka dictionary. 2nd. ed. Editrice Missionaria Italiana, Bologna.
• Nebel, A. (1948). Dinka Grammar (Rek-Malual dialect) with texts and vocabulary. Instituto Missioni Africane, Verona.
• Trudinger. R. (1942–44). English-Dinka Dictionary. Sudan Interior Mission
• Tuttle. Milet Picture Dictionary English-Dinka. (at WorldLanguage.com)

External links

• OpenRoad page on Dinka
• Dinka Language Institute (Australia) (DLIA) multilingual site on Dinka, including in Dinka
• SIL page on Dinka "macrolanguage" (access to SIL & Ethnologue pages)
• PanAfrican L10n page on Dinka
• Dinka alphabet on Answer.com