It is spoken by the Nuer people of South Sudan and in western Ethiopia (region of Gambela).
The latter are written with an underscore in the practical orthography, except for u and ä /ə̤/, where there is no modal-voiced vowel to contrast.
Nuer nouns inflect for two numbers, singular and plural, and three cases, nominative, genitive and locative.
[5] At first glance the inflection is wholly non-systematic and resists description in terms of paradigms: just two suffixes /-kʌ̤/ and /-ni̤/ are used in sixteen different patterns across the stock of nouns, together with different selections from around sixty stem alternations,[6] a situation that Baerman called "paradigmatic chaos".
There are different dialects spoken by Nuer groups living in various locations in South Sudan.
There are also seven counties inhabited by the other groups of Nuer in the western part of the Upper Nile Province currently known as Unity State Bentiu.
These counties include: Among the 120,000 people at the United Nations Protection of Civilians Site Bentiu, Nuer is the preferred language for radio and news.
[9] Nuer-speaking Sudanese refugees have formed a significant community in Omaha, Nebraska, United States.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)[10] The alphabet of Nuer uses 39 distinct letters, shown below in uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) styles.
[4] The writing system was adopted in 1928 with minor changes being added over the history of the language.