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 _______________________________________________ Langcom mailing list Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/ mailman/listinfo/langcom
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