Fon (, ) also known as Dahomean is the language of the

Fon people The Fon people, also called Dahomeans, Fon nu, Agadja and historically called Jeji (Djedji) by the Yoruba in the South American diaspora and in colonial French literature are a Gbe ethnic group.

. It belongs to the Gbe group within the larger Atlantic–Congo family. It is primarily spoken in Benin Republic, as well as in

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

and

Togo Togo, officially the Togolese Republic, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to Ghana–Togo border, the west, Benin to Benin–Togo border, the east and Burkina Faso to Burkina Faso–Togo border, the north. It is one of the le ...

by approximately 2.3 million speakers. Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an

isolating language Social isolation, Isolation is the near or complete lack of social contact by an individual. Isolation or isolated may also refer to: Sociology and psychology *Social isolation *Isolation (psychology), a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theo ...

with a SVO basic word order.

Cultural and legal status

Benin Benin, officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It was formerly known as Dahomey. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north-west, and Niger to the north-east. The majority of its po ...

, French is the official language, and Fon and other indigenous languages, including Yom and Yoruba, are classified as national languages.

Dialects

The standardized Fon language is part of the Fon cluster of languages inside the Eastern Gbe languages. Hounkpati B Christophe Capo groups Agbome, Kpase,

Gun A gun is a device that Propulsion, propels a projectile using pressure or explosive force. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns or water cannon, cannons), or gas (e.g. light-gas gun). So ...

, 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 Rich ...

efforts in Benin, although separate efforts exists for

, Gen, and other languages of the country.

Phonology

Vowels

Fon has seven oral vowel

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

and five nasal vowel phonemes.

Consonants

occurs only in linguistic mimesis and loanwords but is often replaced by in the latter, as in ''cɔ́fù'' 'shop'. Several of the voiced occlusives occur only before oral vowels, and the

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from Latin and ) 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 they share the bilabial place of ...

nasal stops occur only before nasal vowels, which indicates that and are

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

s. is in free variation with and so Fong can be argued to have no phonemic nasal consonants, a pattern rather common in West Africa. is nasalized (to ) before nasal vowels, and may assimilate to before . is sometimes also nasalized. 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: high and low. High is realized as rising (low–high) after a voiced consonant. Basic disyllabic words have all four possibilities: high–high, high–low, low–high, and low–low. In longer

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

s, such as verb and noun phrases, a high tone tends to persist until the final syllable, which, if it has a phonemic low tone, becomes falling (high–low). Low tones disappear between high tones, but their effect remains as a downstep. Rising tones (low–high) simplify to high after high (without triggering downstep) and to low before high. In Ouidah, 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.

Orthographies

Roman alphabet

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 alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

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, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

marks the falling tone: ɖò, akpàkpà *

Caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

marks falling and rising tone: bǔ, bǐ * Circumflex accent 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.

Gbékoun script

Speakers in

also use a distinct script called Gbékoun that was invented by Togbédji Adigbè. It has 24 consonants and 9 vowels, as it is intended to transcribe all the languages of Benin.

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 D ...

: :Translation :All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Use

Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels. Television programs in Fon are shown on the La Beninoise satellite TV channel. French used to be the only language of education in Benin, 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 Christian denomination that is an outgrowth of the Bible Student movement founded by Charles Taze Russell in the nineteenth century. The denomination is nontrinitarian, millenarian, and restorationist. Russell co-fou ...

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

Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

(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 at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

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