The Kom language, ''Itaŋikom'', is the language spoken by the Kom people of

Cameroon Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...

. Shultz 1997a and Shultz 1997b (available online) contain a comprehensive description of the language's grammar. 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 verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey empha ...

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 orthographic system created in the late 1970s for all Cameroonian languages. Consonant and vowel letters are not to contain diacritics, though is a temporary exception. The alphabet is not used suf ...

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

apostrophe The apostrophe ( or ) 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: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

æ and œ, respectively. The orthography is mostly phonemic, although the characters ae, oe, ue, and ’ represent

allophonic 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 ...

variations: the three vowel digraphs are the product of

vowel coalescence In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion, or coalescence, is a sound change where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels. A word like ''educate'' is on ...

, and the apostrophe represents the

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

, 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