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), ÅŠ Å‹
* En with descender, Ò¢ Ò£
* 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 ...
(ÅŠÅ‹), 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. kà e [] "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 CameroonShultz, George, 1997b, Notes on Discourse features of Kom Narrative Texts, SIL CameroonJones, Randy, compiler. 2001. Provisional Kom - English lexcion. Yaoundé, Cameroon: SIL
External links
Ring languages
Languages of Cameroon
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