The Kom language (also Itaŋikom) is the language spoken by the Kom people in Northwest Province in

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

. It is classified as a Central Ring language of the Grassfields,

Southern Bantoid Southern Bantoid (or South Bantoid) is a branch of the Bantoid language family. It consists of the Bantu languages along with several small branches and isolates of eastern Nigeria and west-central Cameroon (though the affiliation of some branch ...

languages in the Niger-Congo language family. Kom is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

with three tones.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Orthography

Kom uses a 29-character Latin-script orthography based on the

General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages The General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages is an orthography, orthographic system created in the late 1970s for all Languages of Cameroon, Cameroonian languages.Tadadjeu, Maurice and Etienne Sadembouo. 1979Alphabet Générale des Langues Camerounai ...

. It contains 20 single characters from the ISO set, six digraphs, and three special characters: barred I (Ɨɨ),

eng Eng or ENG may refer to: Language and linguistics * Eng (letter), Ŋ ŋ * En with descender, Ң ң * eng, ISO 639-3 and ISO 639-2 code for English language * Velar nasal, a phoneme People * Eng (name), a given name and surname in various cu ...

(Ŋŋ), and an

apostrophe The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

(’). The digraphs ae and oe are also written as

ligatures Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...

æ and œ, respectively. The orthography is mostly

phonemic 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 ...

, although the characters ae, oe, ue, and ’ represent

allophonic 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 plosi ...

variations: the three vowel digraphs are the product of vowel coalescence, and the apostrophe represents the

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

, a syllable-final variant of . Although Kom has eight phonetic tones, only two are marked in writing: the low tone [] is written with a grave accent (◌̀) over the vowel (e.g. kàe [] "four"), and the high-low falling tone [] is written with a circumflex (◌̂) over the vowel (e.g. kâf [] "armpit").

References

Bibliography

Shultz, George, 1997a, Kom Language Grammar Sketch Part 1, SIL Cameroon

Shultz, George, 1997b, Notes on Discourse features of Kom Narrative Texts, SIL Cameroon

Jones, Randy, compiler. 2001. Provisional Kom - English lexcion. Yaoundé, Cameroon: SIL

External links

Ring languages Languages of Cameroon {{gras-lang-stub