Dinka linguistic features

Phonology

Consonants

There are 20 consonant phonemes:

	Labial		Dental		Alveolar		Palatal		Velar
Nasal		m		n̪		n		ɲ		ŋ
Plosive	p	b	t̪	d̪	t	d	c	ɟ	k	ɡ
Fricative	f	v	θ	ð	s	z	ɕ	ʝ	x	ɣ
Sonorant		w		l		ɾ		j		ɰ

Vowels

Dinka has a rich vowel system, with at least thirteen phonemically contrastive vowels. The underdots ([◌̤]) indicate "breathy" vowels, represented in Dinka orthography by diaereses (⟨◌̈⟩):

	Front		Back
			unr.		rnd.
	plain	breathy	plain	breathy	plain	breathy
Close	i	i̤	ɯ		u
Near-close	ɪ		ɯ̞		ʊ
Close-mid	e	e̤	ɤ		o	o̤
Open-mid	ɛ	ɛ̤	ʌ		ɔ	ɔ̤
Open	æ		a	a̤	ɒ

On top of this, there are three phonemically contrastive vowel lengths, a feature found in very few languages. Most Dinka verb roots are single, closed syllables with either a short or a long vowel. Some inflections lengthen that vowel:

• /lèl/ 'isolate\2sg'
• /lèːl/ 'isolate\3sg'
• /léːl/ 'provoke\2sg'
• /lèːːl/ 'provoke\3sg'

short	ràaan ā-lèl	"You are isolating a person (ràaan)."
long	ràaan ā-lèel	"He is isolating a person."
overlong	lràaan ā-lèeel	"He is provoking a person."

Voice quality is also a factor, with four different phonetic types present: modal voice, breathy voice, faucalized voice, and harsh voice in its vowels. Of these, only modal and breathy are phonologically contrastive.

Tone

The extensive use of tone and its interaction with morphology is a notable feature of all dialects of Dinka. The Bor dialects all have four tonemes at the syllable level: Low, High, Mid, and Fall.

In Bor proper, falling tone is not found on short vowels except as an inflection for the passive in the present tense. In Nyaarweng and Twïc it is not found at all. In Bor proper, and perhaps in other dialects as well, Fall is only realized as such at the end of a prosodic phrase. Elsewhere it becomes High.

In Bor proper and perhaps other dialects, a Low tone is only phonetically low after another low tone. Elsewhere it is falling, but not identical to Fall: It does not become High in the middle of a phrase, and speakers can distinguish the two falling tones despite the fact that they have the same range of pitch. The difference appears to be in the timing: with Fall one hears a high level tone that then falls, whereas the falling allophone of Low starts falling and then levels out. (That is, one falls on the first mora of the vowel, whereas the other falls on the second mora.) This is unusual because it has been theorized that such timing differences are never phonemic.

Morphology

This language exhibits vowel ablaut or apophony, the change of internal vowels (similar to English goose/geese):

Singular	Plural	gloss	vowel alternation
dom	dum	'field/fields'	(o–u)
kat	kɛt	'frame/frames'	(a–ɛ)

External links

• Dinka language