Dinka is a generic name for a group of dialects in the Dinka Group of Western Nilotic languages. It is spoken by the Jien (Dinka) along the White Nile in the Sudan.
Estimates of speakers of Dinka range from there are more than one million speakers of Dinka (A.N. Tucker 1981, using 1955-1956 census data) to two million (Grimes 1996). Voegelin and Voegelin (1977) note 39,000 Rek and 92,000 other Dinka speakers. The following table is drawn from data presented in Ethnologue (Grimes 1996):
| Dialect |
Number
|
Source (cited in Grimes [1996]) |
| Agar (Central or South Central) |
250,000
|
Tucker and Bryan |
| Bor (Southeastern) |
250,000
|
Tucker and Bryan |
| Padang (Northeastern or White Nile) |
320,000
|
UBS 1986 |
| Rek (Western) |
450,000
|
UBS 1982 |
| Northwestern Dinka |
80,000
|
Ruweng 1986 |
| 1,030,000 |
Dinka has great regional importance in the Sudan.
Dinka has a Romanized orthography developed from the 1928 Rejaf language conference; some modifications have been suggested from the work of the Institute of Regional Language's Literacy Project. There is no Arabic script for Dinka.
One set of materials should be sufficient, although the dialect upon which it should be based is undetermined.
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