Fon (, ) is spoken in

Benin Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north ...

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

Togo Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...

and

Gabon Gabon (; ; snq, Ngabu), officially the Gabonese Republic (french: République gabonaise), is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. Located on the equator, it is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north ...

by approximately 1.7 million speakers, and is the language of the

Fon people The Fon people, also called Fon nu, Agadja or Dahomey, are a Gbe ethnic group.Fon people
Encyclopædia Britan ...

. Like the other

Gbe languages The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ...

, Fon is an

isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages a ...

with an SVO basic word order.

Cultural and legal status

In Benin,

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

is the official language, while Fon and other indigenous languages, including the

Yom Yom ( he, יום) is a Biblical Hebrew word which occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The word means day in both Modern and Biblical Hebrew. Overview Although ''yom'' is commonly rendered as day in English translations, the word yom can be used in diffe ...

and

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...

languages, are classified as national languages.

Grammar

Dialects

The standardized Fon language is part of the Fon cluster of languages inside the Eastern Gbe languages.

Hounkpati B Christophe Capo Hounkpati B Christophe Capo (born January 1, 1953Capo, Hounkpati B. C. (Hounkpati Bamikpo Christophe ...

groups Agbome, Kpase,

Gun A gun is a ranged weapon designed to use a shooting tube (gun barrel) to launch projectiles. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns/cannons, spray guns for painting or pressure washing, pr ...

, Maxi and Weme (Ouémé) in the Fon dialect cluster, although other clusterings are suggested. Standard Fon is the primary target of

language planning In sociolinguistics, language planning (also known as language engineering) is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure or acquisition of languages or language varieties within a speech community.Kaplan B., Robert, and Richard ...

efforts in Benin, although separate efforts exists for Gun,

Gen Gen may refer to: * ''Gen'' (film), 2006 Turkish horror film directed by Togan Gökbakar * Gen (Street Fighter), a video game character from the ''Street Fighter'' series * Gen Fu, a video game character from the ''Dead or Alive'' series * Gen l ...

, and other languages of the country. To date, there are about 53 different dialects of the Fon language spoken throughout Benin.

Phonology

Vowels

Fon has seven oral vowel

phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

and five nasal vowel phonemes.

Consonants

only occurs in

linguistic mimesis Ideophone is a word class evoking ideas in sound imitation or onomatopoeia to express action, manner of property. Ideophone is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically occurring mostly in African, Australian and Amerindian langua ...

and loanwords, though often it is replaced by in the latter, as in ''cɔ́fù'' 'shop'. Several of the voiced occlusives only occur before oral vowels, while the

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from ''homo-'' "same" and ''organ'' "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another since ...

nasal stops only occur before nasal vowels, indicating that and are

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...

s. is in free variation with ; Fongbe therefore can be argued to have no phonemic nasal consonants, a pattern rather common in West Africa. and are also nasalized before nasal vowels; may be assimilated to before . The only consonant clusters in Fon have or as the second consonant; after (post)alveolars, is optionally realized as : ' 'to wash', 'to catch', 'to want'.

Tone

Fon has two phonemic tones, and . is realized as rising (low–high) after a voiced consonant. Basic disyllabic words have all four possibilities: –, –, –, and –. In longer

phonological word The phonological word or prosodic word (also called pword, PrWd; symbolised as ω) is a constituent in the phonological hierarchy higher than the syllable and the foot but lower than intonational phrase and the phonological phrase. It is largely he ...

s, such as verb and noun phrases, a high tone tends to persist until the final syllable; if that syllable has a phonemic low tone, it becomes falling (high–low). Low tones disappear between high tones, but their effect remains as a

downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be disting ...

. Rising tones (low–high) simplify to after (without triggering downstep) and to before . : : :"The fishmonger, she bought two crabs" In

Ouidah Ouidah () or Whydah (; ''Ouidah'', ''Juida'', and ''Juda'' by the French; ''Ajudá'' by the Portuguese; and ''Fida'' by the Dutch) and known locally as Glexwe, formerly the chief port of the Kingdom of Whydah, is a city on the coast of the Repub ...

, a rising or falling tone is realized as a mid tone. For example, 'we, you', phonemically high-tone but phonetically rising because of the voiced consonant, is generally mid-tone in Ouidah.

Orthography

The Fon alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters Ɖ/ɖ, Ɛ/ɛ, and Ɔ/ɔ, and the digraphs gb, hw, kp, ny, and xw.

Tone marking

Tones are marked as follows: *

Acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...

marks the rising tone: xó, dó *

Grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...

marks the falling tone: ɖò, akpàkpà *

Caron A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...

marks falling and rising tone: bǔ, bǐ *

Circumflex accent The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

marks the rising and falling tone: côfù * Macron marks the neutral tone: kān Tones are fully marked in reference books, but not always marked in other writing. The tone marking is phonemic, and the actual pronunciation may be different according to the syllable's environment.

Sample text

From the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal De ...

: :

Use

Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels. Television programs in Fon is shown on the

La Beninoise LA most frequently refers to Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States. La, LA, or L.A. may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * La (musical note), or A, the sixth note * "L.A.", a song by Elliott Smith on Figure 8 ( ...

satellite TV channel. French used to be the only language of

education in Benin Benin has abolished school fees and is carrying out the recommendations of its 2007 Educational Forum.

, but in the second decade of the twenty first century, the government is experimenting with teaching some subjects in Benin schools in the country's local languages, among them Fon.

Machine translation efforts

There is an effort to create a machine translator for Fon (to and from French), by Bonaventure Dossou (from Benin) and Chris Emezue (from Nigeria). Their project is called FFR. It uses phrases from

Jehovah's Witnesses Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The group reports a worldwide membership of approximately 8.7 million adherents involved in ...

sermons as well as other biblical phrases as the research corpus to train a

Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

(NLP) neural net model.

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

A Facebook application to use and learn the Fon language, developed by Jolome.com

The first blog totally in Fongbe. An access to a Fongbe forum is given

Journal of West African Languages: Articles on Fon

''Manuel dahoméen : grammaire, chrestomathie, dictionnaire français-dahoméen et dahoméen-français'', 1894
by

Maurice Delafosse Maurice Delafosse (20 December 1870 – 13 November 1926) was a French ethnography, ethnographer and colonial official who also worked in the field of the languages of Africa. In a review of his daughter's biography of him he was described as "one ...

at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

(in French) {{Authority control Gbe languages Languages of Benin Fon people