Dilling language
language of Sudan
Dilling (also Delen, Warkimbe; autonym: Warki) is a Hill Nubian language spoken in the northwestern Nuba Mountains in the south of Sudan. It is spoken by around 12,000 people in the town of Dilling and surrounding hills, including Kudur. Ethnologue reports that Dilling is moribund, with only older adults speaking the language and not using it with their children. All speakers also use Sudanese Arabic. The Dilling call themselves Warki, while the Dilling speakers of Kudur call themselves Kwashe. Another ethnic minority that speak Dilling are the Debri people, an ethnic group of several thousand people from South Kordofan in Sudan.
Dialects
Dilling has one dialect – Debri, which is spoken on the mountain Gebel Debri, south of Ghulfan.
Phonology
Dilling has 9 vowels a, e, ẹ, ḙ, i, ọ, ǒ, u and 21 consonants as following (Gebel Delen 1920:3):
Nouns
In Dilling there is no difference grammatical gender in nouns verb forms, pronouns and relative terms, to express a gender in a person one adds expression to clarify such as for example korti (man) or ḙli (woman). These are added apposition without a connector. With animals the name classifies gender and species, 'tẹ' "female cow" and 'tere' "bull".
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This entry incorporates text from “Dilling language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.