Bongo (Bungu), also known as Dor, is a Central Sudanic language spoken by the Bongo people in sparsely populated areas of Bahr al Ghazal in South Sudan.
Bongo has ten vowel qualities,[2] which can be long or short.
[4] Bongo is tonal language that has the high (á), mid (ā), low (à) and falling (â) tones.
[5] The first ethnologists to work with the Bongo language were John Petherick, who published Bongo word lists in his 1861 work, Egypt, the Soudan, and Central Africa; Theodor von Heuglin, who also published Bongo word lists in Reise in das Gebiet des Weissen Nil, &c. 1862-1864 in 1869; and Georg August Schweinfurth, who contributed sentences and vocabularies in his Linguistische Ergebnisse, Einer Reise Nach Centralafrika in 1873.
[7] More recent scholarship has been done by Eileen Kilpatrick, who published a phonology of Bongo in 1985.