ברי

Bari (Karo Bari, "the Bari speech") is an Eastern Nilotic language of the Bari cluster, spoken across the South Sudan-Uganda border region. The Bari people are pastoral cattle-herders of the Equatorial Nile region, with their cultural homeland centered on Juba, the South Sudan capital. The Bari cluster (Bari, Mandari, Kakwa, Pojulu, Kuku) shows mutual intelligibility but distinct ethnopolitical identities. Linguistically, Bari shares Eastern Nilotic features with Maasai (mas) and Samburu (saq): tonal (high/low/mid), focus markers, masculine/feminine gender, and SVO constituent order. Italian Comboni missionaries developed the standard orthography in the 19th century; Bari has a substantial Bible translation tradition.