Dinka is a member of the Western Nilotic branch of Nilo-Saharan languages. The Rek dialect is considered the standard or prestige variety. A number of methods for writing Dinka using the Latin alphabet were developed by missionaries during the 19th and 20th centuries. Information about the language first appeared in Die Dinka-Sprache in Central-Afrika by Johannes Chrysostomus Mitterrutzner, which was publised in The current Latin orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 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 South Kordofan state of Sudan as well as Bahr el Ghazal region and Upper Nile state of South Sudan.
Ada beberapa varietas utama, Padang, Rek, Agaar, Awiel, Twic, Bor, yang cukup berbeda meskipun saling dapat dipahami untuk memerlukan standar sastra yang terpisah. Jaang, Jieng atau Monyjieng digunakan sebagai istilah umum untuk mencakup semua bahasa Dinka.
Rek adalah dialek standar dan prestise. It was during those years that they created their own alphabet based on the Latin one. This is the why, even today there is a high rate of illiteracy in the Dinka population. In previous articles we have emphasized the strong influence of culture on language. The indefinite has no tense marker but the vowel of the main verb is shortened and sometimes changed ; it expresses a definite statement in the present, past or future and it may have a progressive sense.
These tenses are negated also by particles: ci negates the indefinite and the future, kec the past, and cie the habitual. Ci is homophonous with the past tense marker but they are differentiated by tone. When the agent is not mentioned, the passive form is identical to the active, being differentiated by intonation and context. When an agent is mentioned there is usually a vowel change e. The imperative and interrogative forms are the same, differing only in intonation.
In questions and answers the subject pronoun is contracted with the tense particles and in questions the prefix a- is omitted. Prohibitions are expressed with the auxiliary verb duk placed before the indefinite or habitual form of the main verb. In general word order is Subject-Verb-Object but in one dialect Agar the subject is postverbal. Adjectives and numerals follow their nouns.
When the numeral is prefixed by ka- the noun adopts the plural; if the numeral lacks this prefix the noun is put in the singular:. I want hens two. I want two hens. The woman has ten hens. Postverbal but not preverbal subjects are marked with nominative case by way of tonal inflection, a feature also found in other Western Nilotic languages. Passive sentences without an agent have the same form as in the active voice, being differentiated only by intonation and context:.
When the agent is mentioned, verbs without a tense particle are accentuated and may experience a vowel change. When there is a tense particle, its vowel is lengthened. Lexical borrowings are mainly from colloquial Arabic and English. The former has provided loanwords for household utensils, foodstuffs and common function words. The latter has contributed to the fields of administration, education, science and technology.
Kinship terms are always expressed in relation to somebody and never in abstract form 'our mother', 'your father', 'my sister', etc.
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