Dongotono language

Dongotono has been classified as a member of the Eastern Nilotic branch of Nilotic, in the Eastern Sudanic sub-grouping of Nilo-Saharan. Within Eastern Nilotic, Dongotono is considered part of the Lotuko language group, in the Lotuko-Maa branch of Teso-Lotuko-Maa (also referred to as the non-Bari languages).[3] Other members of the Lotuko language group include Lopit, Lotuko, Lokoya and Lango, all spoken in nearby regions of in South Sudan. Of these languages, Lopit is most similar to Dongotono, with a comparative study showing 66.4% lexical similarity between the two. The same study showed 60.6% lexical similarity between Dongotono and Lotuko, and 56.5% similarity between Dongotono and Lokoya.[4]

The Dongotono language is spoken by the Dongotono people, who live on the north-western slopes of the Dongotono Mountains in the southern part of Eastern Equatoria State, South Sudan. Administratively, this area is part of Ikotos County, and the Dongotono live in large and densely populated settlements which include Chakari, Ikotos, Isoke and Chorokol,.[1][5] There are an estimated 5,000 speakers of the language,[1] and the language is considered threatened, though the number of Dongotono people may be as much as 35,000.[6]

There has been very little research on Dongotono, but some tentative phonological and morphological observations can be found in Vossen (1982), based on wordlist data collected in the 1970s. Vossen notes that the data are too limited to draw any safe conclusions. He observed that the phoneme inventories of Dongotono, Lokoya and Lopit were similar enough to be treated together, and provided a consonant inventory for all three languages together, represented in the table below.[7]

Word order in Dongotono is generally Verb-Subject-Object, as is typical for most Eastern Nilotic languages.

Vossen states that for all the non-Bari languages, including Dongotono, the verbs fall into two morphological classes, conventionally called Class 1 and Class 2. Class 2 verbs have a stem with an initial close-front vowel /i-/ or /ɪ-/, and Class 1 verb stems are consonant-initial. A number of possible verbal affixes were observed but their functions not determined.

Number-marking on nouns appears to be extremely irregular. A variety of suffixes are used to indicate singular, singulative, and plural.

Like other languages in the Lotuko group, Dongotono has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine.[11]

Some example Dongotono words are given below, from the wordlist in Vossen (1982). Each Dongotono word is in the phonetic transcription used by Vossen, as there is not yet an established orthography for the language.