The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese

Dinka people The Dinka people ( din, Jiɛ̈ɛ̈ŋ) are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan with a sizable diaspora population abroad. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Jonglei to Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile (two out of ...

. The written

Dinka language Dinka (natively , or simply ) is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are several main varieties, Padang, Rek, Agaar, Bor, Hol, Twic East, Twic, which are distinct enough (though m ...

is based on the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...

, but with some added letters adapted from the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the

Rejaf Rejaf, also Rajāf or Rageef, is a community in Central Equatoria in South Sudan, on the west bank of the White Nile. The Lado Enclave was an exclave of the Congo Free State that existed from 1894 until 1910, leased by the British to King Leo ...

language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet.

Alphabet

Dinka does not use ''f, q, s, v, x'', and ''z''; and ''h'' is used in digraphs only. Note that ''ɛ̈'' (open ''e'' with trema/umlaut) and ''ɔ̈'' (open ''o'' with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic. Dental consonants are distinguished from alveolar by adding a following ''h''. Otherwise, consonants match with their IPA equivalents, except /ɲ/, which is written as ''ny''; /ɟ/, written ''j''; /j/, written ''y''; and /ɾ/, written ''r''. Plain vowels match their IPA equivalents, and the diaeresis indicates

breathy voice Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...

phonation, which phonemically contrasts with modal voice.

References

{{Reflist

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20050419004051/http://www.openroad.net.au/languages/african/dinka.html Latin alphabets Languages of Sudan Latin-script orthographies Writing systems of Africa