The Dinka alphabet as used by the Sudanese Dinka people writing the Dinka language

Dinka language

This article is about the language, for the ethnic group see Dinka.Dinka, or , is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are five main varieties, Ngok, Rek, Agaar, Twic / Tuic East, and Bor, which are distinct enough to require separate...

 is Latin, adding some letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

 to the basic Latin alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf

Rejaf

Rejaf, also Rajjāf or Rageef, is a community in Central Equatoria State in South Sudan, on the west bank of the White Nile.The Lado Enclave was an exclave of the Congo Free State that existed from 1894 until 1910, leased by the British to King Leopold II of Belgium for the period of his lifetime...

 language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but there neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet.

Alphabet

Dinka alphabet

Uppercase	A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...	Ä Ä "Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...	B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...	C C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets...	D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the...	Dh DH -Flying:* de Havilland, a former UK aircraft manufacturer* Decision height, an element of aviational instrument approach* Independence Air's IATA code-Health:* Department of Health , a branch of government...	E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...	Ë Ë is a letter in the Albanian, Ripuarian, Uyghur Latin Script, Ladin, and Kashubian languages. This letter also appears in Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Abruzzese dialect , and Luxembourgish language as a variant of letter "e"...	Ɛ	Ɛ̈	G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...	Ɣ	I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...	Ï Ï ', lowercase ', is a symbol used in various languages written with the Latin alphabet and in Ukrainian language which is written with the Cyrillic based Ukrainian alphabet; it can be read as the letter I with diaeresis or I-umlaut....	J J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...	K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA....	L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...	M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water...	N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...	Nh Nh (digraph) Nh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of N and H. Together with lh and the interpunct, it was a typical feature of Old Occitan, the language used by medieval troubadours.-African languages:...	Ny	Ŋ Eng (letter) Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.-History:...	O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...	Ö Ö "Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...	Ɔ	Ɔ̈	P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words...	R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R...	T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets...	Th TH - Places :* Thailand, ISO 3166-1 country code** .th, the country code top level domain for Thailand* Thuringia, a state of Germany* Territory of Hawaii, a term referring to Hawaii prior to statehood-People:...	U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....	W W W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...	Y Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...
Lowercase	a	ä	b	c	d	dh	e	ë	ɛ	ɛ̈	g	ɣ	i	ï	j	k	l	m	n	nh	ny	ŋ	o	ö	ɔ	ɔ̈	p	r	t	th	u	w	y

As you can see, Dinka does not use f, j, q, s, v, x, and z; and h is used in digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

s only.

Dinka special letters and digraphs

Uppercase	Ä	Dh	Ë	Ɛ	Ɛ̈	Ɣ	Ï	Nh	Ny	Ŋ	Ö	Ɔ	Ɔ̈	Th
Lowercase	ä	dh	ë	ɛ	ɛ̈	ɣ	ï	nh	ny	ŋ	ö	ɔ	ɔ̈	th
Alternatives	a	d͏h	e	é, e	é, e	gh, q	i	n͏h	n͏y	ng	o	ó, o	ó, o	t͏h
Unicode (hexadecimal)	C4 E4		CB EB	190 25B	190+308 25B+308	194 263	CF EF			14A 14B	D6 F6	186 254	186+308 254+308

Note that ɛ̈ (open e with trema/umulaut) and ɔ̈ (open o with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic.