Dear Amir, 

This is in connection to opening a Wikipedia in Dinka. We have translated more than 100 articles and put them them in the Incubator, and we have also translated all of the terms needed to open a Wikipedia. Almost all of the translations were done at 5 workshops of Akutmɛ̈t Latueŋ Thuɔŋjäŋ (the Dinka Language Development Association, or DILDA) in Juba, South Sudan, in the last 2 and a half years. I participated in these workshop but the translations were done by the Dinka participants; there were about 25-30 translators at each workshop, but the specific people involved changed somewhat from one workshop to the next so that I would guess maybe 50 different people participated in doing the translations. A few of the translations (maybe 5 or 6) were done by me and other members of the Facebook group of the same name. DILDA in Juba is a private NGO which has existed since around 2006 with about 60 dues-paying members, all of them Dinkas and citizens of South Sudan, and it is registered as an NGO with the South Sudanese government; the Facebook group of the same name has existed for about a year and has 12,800 members, the overwhelming majority of whom do not live in South Sudan. Very few of the people participating in the Juba workshops are in the Facebook group (maybe 3 or 4). I uploaded all of the translations to the Incubator myself although I did not do the translations myself, because I have more consistent access to the internet in Israel than do the DILDA members in South Sudan, because I wanted to regularize the orthography according to the conventions we agreed on at the workshops, and because I did not realize that this would create the impression that I had done all of the translations myself. 

There is some urgency to get this Wikipedia approved and on the internet in the next week or two. Until now all of DILDA's activities have been in Juba, because this is the effectively the only city in South Sudan and because this is the only place where members of the different dialect groups live together. However, May 1 to May 15 of this year, a number of DILDA members and I will be traveling around South Sudan to meet representatives of the state governments (there are 10 Dinka-speaking states) to talk to them about the organization and its work and to begin to coordinate our activities with the work of the state governments. It has been our hope that we will be able to show them the Dinka Wikipedia so that they will understand that our work is serious and that the Dinka language is being developed so as to be used in a wide variety of functions, so that it can and should be used in more functions and not excluded from government and education in favor of English (only a tiny majority of Dinkas can function in English (perhaps 2% of them), while Dinka is spoken by about 4 million people). Dinkas are in principle very supportive of the idea of using their language for all written functions but they are simply not aware that this is possible because they do not now about DILDA's activities. The trip around South Sudan was planned at this time so as to come as soon as possible after we completed the translations of 100 articles in March and before the rains begin in South Sudan in June and make traveling around the country effectively impossible until next year. It is therefore very important that the Dinka Wikipedia be approved as quickly as possible. 

Thank you very much for your help and best wishes,

John Myhill

John Myhill

Professor of Linguistics

Department of English Language and Literature

University of Haifa

Mt. Carmel, Haifa, 31905

Israel