I received replies from five Dinka language scholars (one of them a
native speaker), representing DILDA (the Dinka Language Development
Association), SIL International and the University of Edinburgh. They
all unanimously declared that one wikipedia for ISO code [din] will be
sufficient. They also were supportive of Prof. Myhill's efforts on
behalf of the Dinka wikipedia and for a unified orthography.
Individual reasons given included:
* "To the best of my knowledge, the dialects are mutually intelligible."
* "I would find it really pretty tragic if Wikipedia forced the Dinkas
to pursue multiple written standards. With only a few million
speakers in an unsettled political context, Dinka is going to have a
hard enough time making a success of creating a written standard as
it is; chop it up into four or five "languages" and you more or less
guarantee that they are too small to have any impact. Obviously
there will be lexical and grammatical differences in the work of
different writers, but that's true of different varieties of
English, too, without implying that we're dealing with a collection
of separate languages."
* "The designation of four Dinka languages reflect dialect cluster
identities and church denominational areas where attitudes favour
separate Bible translations, but are not highly developed identities
in other ways (political/military). The designation of one Dinka
macrolanguage reflects not only high overall lexical similarity
(80%+) and mutual intelligibility (90%+) as assessed in the SIL
survey (Roettger & Roettger 1989), but also a larger ethnolinguistic
identity expressed through one common agreed orthography, and more
recently through one language development association."
* "Dinka people look to Thuɔŋjäŋ [ethnonym for Dinka language] as one
language but not languages. Those Dinka varieties can be realized as
dialects in a spoken language."
So, I guess, that clinches it, and we can go ahead with
din.wikipedia.org (on the condition of successfully concluding
verification, of course!).
Best,
Oliver
On 02-Feb-17 13:24, Oliver Stegen wrote:
I know a couple of linguists working on Dinka. Bible translations are
definitely existing or going on in different varieties but maybe, one
wikipedia may still work. I'll keep you posted once I've heard from my
contacts.
On 29-Jan-17 06:50, Milos Rancic wrote:
Oliver, I think this is your area... According to Ethnologue, Dinka
[1] is a Nilo-Saharan "macrolanguage", with languages Northeastern
Dinka [2], Northwestern Dinka [3], South Central Dinka [4],
Southeastern Dinka [5] and Southwestern Dinka [6].
The whole population is 1.4 million, it's about very poor South Sudan.
Is there a sense to create one Wikipedia or to go with separate
languages?
[1]https://www.ethnologue.com/language/din
[2]https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dip
[3]https://www.ethnologue.com/language/diw
[4]https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dib
[5]https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dks
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