The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese

Dinka people The Dinka people () are a Nilotes, Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Mangalla-Bor to Renk, South Sudan, Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan), Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nil ...

. The written

Dinka language Dinka (natively , or simply ) is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, a major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are several main varieties, such as Padang, Rek, Agaar, Ciec, Malual, Apaak, Aliab, Bor, Hol, Nyarweng, Twic Eas ...

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 notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

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

IPA

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 s ...

phonation, which phonemically contrasts with modal voice.

Unicode

Note that ''ɛ̈'' (open ''e'' with trema/umlaut) and ''ɔ̈'' (open ''o'' with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic.

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