Luanyjang Dinka

Abstract

Dinka is a Western Nilotic language within the Nilo-Saharan family. There are over two million speakers (Gordon 2005). The Dinkas live along the banks of the White Nile and its tributaries in Southern Sudan. There are also communities elsewhere within Sudan, in particular in the capital Khartoum, and abroad. Cows play a key role in the Dinka economy, and also in the sociocultural system. Four major dialect areas are commonly distinguished: Padang, Rek, Agar, and Bor. The variety of Dinka represented here – Luanyjang or, as in Roettger & Roettger (1989), Luac – is part of the Rek dialect group. The term Luanyjang ‘Luac Dinka’ refers in the first place to a section within the Dinka ethnic group, and by extension also to their variety of the Dinka language. The main Luanyjang town is Wuncuei, located about 170 kilometers east of the city of Wau. Luanyjang has around 15000 speakers according to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), although the current number is likely to be much higher.

Tonal alignment is contrastive in falling contours in Dinka

“…A salient characteristic of Dinka phonology is its rich system of suprasegmental contrasts: tone, vowel length, and voice quality are all distinctive, independently of one another (Andersen 1987, Remijsen & Manyang 2009). The minimal set in 2 illustrates the vowel-length contrast.…”

On the distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology: Evidence from Dinka

“…Alternations between short (/V/) and long (/VVV/) in this context were coded as involving a single degree of vowel length. For further detail on vowel length before coda /r/ see Remijsen & Gilley 2008, Remijsen & Manyang 2009 Note that in the first instance we are concerned only with DIFFERENCES between singular and plural; we make no assumption about which form is unmarked and which is marked, because of the general nature of Nilo-Saharan number morphology noted earlier. That is, our coding is neutral with regard to the direction of the difference, and, for example, a difference in vowel length between short /V/ and medium /VV/ is coded as a difference of one degree of vowel length regardless of which vowel length occurs in the singular form and which in the plural.…”

“…Consequently we took great care to be sure that the forms we report are correct, putting words in different sentence contexts and carrying out instrumental acoustic measurements where necessary, and we are confident that the data can be considered reliable. As noted above, the dialect under study is Luanyjang Dinka, the sound system of which is familiar to us from several studies carried out in conjunction with the work reported here (Remijsen & Gilley 2008, Remijsen & Ladd 2008, Remijsen & Manyang 2009). The data are based on the speech of the third author, but have been checked for consistency with other speakers in Khartoum; for only ten nouns out of the 400 was there any variability.…”

“…Dinka is of particular phonological interest because of its rich suprasegmental system, which includes independent distinctions of tone, vowel length, and voice quality. The dialect represented here (Luanyjang, part of the Rek dialect cluster) has four tonemes (Remijsen & Ladd 2008), three degrees of vowel length (Remijsen & Gilley 2008), and a two-way distinction of voice quality (breathy vs. modal or creaky) (Remijsen & Manyang 2009); the facts about other dialects (many of which are essentially undocumented) differ in detail but are broadly similar.…”

“…This is not an entirely trivial task, in part because of the phonetic nature of the distinctions involved. The three-way length distinction can be difficult to hear in isolation; one of the tonal distinctions is neutralized or nearly neutralized in citation form (Remijsen & Ladd 2008); there are allophonic interactions of voice quality and vowel quality (Remijsen & Manyang 2009); and in the still-developing orthography the suprasegmental distinctions are represented inadequately or not at all. Consequently we took great care to be sure that the forms we report are correct, putting words in different sentence contexts and carrying out instrumental acoustic measurements where necessary, and we are confident that the data can be considered reliable.…”