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 | ||||
| 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.
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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 |
This language exhibits vowel ablaut or apophony, the change of internal vowels (similar to English goose/geese, though this is actually an umlaut):
| Singular | Plural | gloss | vowel alternation |
|---|---|---|---|
| dom | dum | 'field/fields' | (o-u) |
| kat | kɛt | 'frame/frames' | (a-ɛ) |
Dinka is a tonal language.
Linguists divide Dinka into five main dialect clusters corresponding to their geographic location with respect to each other:
See Ethnologue online map of Sudan for locations of dialects.
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 |
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ė ("e" with a dot on top.) |
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h, x, q |
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ng |
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ȯ ("O" with a dot on top.) |