A Western Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan, of which five major dialects exist: Northeastern Dinka (Padaŋ), Northwestern Dinka, South Central Dinka (Agar), Southeastern Dinka (Bor), and Southwestern Dinka (Rek). The language is spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group in South Sudan, and it has over 1,400,000 speakers.
Dinka culture and society is an oral culture and became codified through the Arabic and Latin scripts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Christian missionaries played a key role in the development of written Dinka.
CLASSIFICATION = Nilo-Saharan, SCRIPT = Latin
