Dinka

Dinka, called Thuɔŋjäŋ by its speakers, is a Western Nilotic language of the Nilo-Saharan family, spoken along the White Nile and around the Sudd swamps. It is a chain of largely mutually intelligible dialects whose grammar depends on tone and vowel quality; its closest relative is Nuer.

The Dinka once lived in the Gezira under the Nubian kingdom of Alodia, from which the language took Nubian vocabulary. When Alodia crumbled from the thirteenth century they began moving south, and the drift continued from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century after the Funj built their sultanate at Soba in 1504, as Nilotic groups competed for pasture and cattle.

The Egyptian conquest of the Funj realm in 1821 opened the White Nile to traders and slave raiders, bringing the Dinka and their Nuer kinsmen into a harsher frontier on the edge of Egyptian Sudan.