Dinka alphabet

The Dinka alphabet as used by South Sudanese Dinka people writing the Dinka language is Latin, adding some letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet to the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 1928.[1] 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.[2]

Alphabet

Dinka alphabet
Uppercase AÄBCDDhEËƐƐ̈GƔIÏJKLMNNhNyŊOÖƆƆ̈PRTThUWY
Lowercase aäbcddheëɛɛ̈gɣiïjklmnnhnyŋoöɔɔ̈prtthuwy

As you can see, Dinka does not use f, q, s, v, x, and z; and h is used in digraphs only.

Dinka special letters and digraphs
Uppercase ÄDhËƐƐ̈ƔÏNhNyŊÖƆƆ̈Th
Lowercase ädhëɛɛ̈ɣïnhnyŋöɔɔ̈th
Alternatives ad͏heé, eé, egh, qin͏hn͏yngoó, oó, ot͏h
Unicode (hexadecimal) C4 E4 CB EB 190 25B 190+308 25B+308 194 263 CF EF 14A 14B D6 F6 186 254 186+308 254+308

Note that ɛ̈ (open e with trema/umlaut) and ɔ̈ (open o with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic.

References

  1. "Dinka language, alphabet and pronunciation". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2016-08-04.

External links

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