One of my ESOL [English as a Second Language] students is a
68-year-old Dinka lady. Like many older students with no prior formal
education her progress in English is painfully slow - she has been in
the UK 23 years. Unlike other students, however, she persists in using
the personal pronoun "she" - in place of "I", "you", "he", "it", "we",
and "they"! I would like to be pointed towards any literature that
exists on this baffling phenomenon.

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Request for Question Clarification by leli-ga on 20 May 2004 02:28 PDT

Hello Panchita

There is some information available on how Dinka changes a verb from,
say, first person singular to third person plural, and it is a system
that would be very inaccessible to most English-speakers. I don't know
if researching further in this direction would help to throw light on
your question. It doesn't look as if it would offer any explanation
for favouring "she" over other pronouns, although it should explain
some of the difficulties a Dinka-speaker would find in understanding
our system.

If you'd like me to pursue this approach, do let me know.

Thanks - Leli

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Clarification of Question by panchita-ga on 20 May 2004 12:23 PDT

Hello Leli and thank you for responding so promptly.

No, I'm not sure either that Dinka grammar itself would offer an
explanation as to why my student is so attached to the third person
feminine singular - she recently told the class about the time her
handbag was stolen from a restaurant: her husband, the waiter, the
thief, the police and herself were all referred to as "she"...! Other
Dinka learners only confuse "he", "she" and "it" - as do many
non-Dinka ESOL learners.

However, I would in any case be very interested to know more about the
structure of the Dinka language [including verb systems] - I've found
very little info myself. So please pursue this line of enquiry.

Cheers!

Panchita

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Request for Question Clarification by leli-ga on 21 May 2004 04:04 PDT

Thanks for your message, Panchita.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to build on my initial findings, so
I'm just leaving some notes in the comments section.

Good luck with your teaching - Leli

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Clarification of Question by panchita-ga on 23 May 2004 13:29 PDT

Thank you, Leli - the phil-fak link was very interesting.

Who knows - maybe my student is making weird and wonderful
modifications to the word "she" to express person, gender and
number....

Best wishes, Panchita

Thanks also to pinkfreud and marvista!

I am not an expert on Dinka, but some Nilo-Saharan languages use a
single pronoun for "he," "she," or "it." If a person's native tongue
has pronouns that are not gender-specific, I would imagine that this
might cause difficulties in choosing correct pronouns when speaking
English.

Here's an interesting quote:

"My remarks shall centre on a personal observation. That beyond
naming, African languages don?t seem to have any use for gender. For
example, there don?t seem to be gender specific pronouns in any modern
African language."

http://www.soas.ac.uk/Literatures/Projects/Gender/gender1abstracts.pdf

I'm not clear if you're asking about why she still uses just "she" or
why she's been so "slow" to acquire the pronouns.  Stephen Krashen, a
linguist at USC, provides a good overview of second language
acquisition which would cover both of these issues.  You can download
one of his entire textbooks on his website:

http://www.sdkrashen.com/main.php3

Most online information about Dinka leads back to work done by Torben
Andersen, including a study where he explores vowel change in Dinka
verbs.

To change person, number etc., the vowel in the verb can shift in one
or more of these ways:
 * vowel quality/shape           
 * vowel length                  
 * tone                          - shown by "accents" over the vowel
 * breathiness/creakiness        - shown by subscript lines and dots

There are some affixes as well, and, as you thought, no he/she/it difference.

You might like to look at the following article and see if it helps at all.
Starting on page 46:

"For the Western Nilotic language Dinka, nonaffixal morphology is the
norm. Despite the fact that it is almost entirely monosyllabic, Dinka
manages to have a very rich morphology by exploiting alternations in
vowel quality, vowel length, voice quality, tone, and final
consonants, as demonstrated by Andersen (1993) for the Agar dialect,
spoken in Southern Sudan. . . . . "
http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/summerschool2002/Aronoff2.pdf
(Adobe Acrobat Reader required to read a pdf document)

I think the only Dinka grammar book in English is:

Main Author:	Nebel, A. (Arturo)
Title Details:	Dinka grammar : (Rek-Malual dialect) with texts and
vocabulary / by A. Nebel ; English text revised by C. W. Beer
Series:	Museum Combonianum ; 2
Publisher:	Verona : Missioni Africane, 1948
Physical desc.:	xiv, 173 p ; 26 cm

And a dictionary by the same Father Nebel:

Main Author:	Nebel, A.
Title Details:	Dinka-Dictionary with Abridged Grammar. (English-Dinka.
Dinka-English-Italian.)
Publisher:	Verona : Missioni Africane, 1936.
Physical desc.:	pp. xli. 133. 176. ; 12o.