The General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages is an
orthographic system created in the late 1970s for all
Cameroonian languages.
Bird, Stephen. 2001. "Orthography and Identity in Cameroon."
/ref> Consonant and vowel letters are not to contain diacritics, though is a temporary exception. The alphabet is not used sufficiently for the one unique letter, a bilabial trill
The voiced bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B\.
Features
Features of the voiced ...
, to have been added to Unicode.
Maurice Tadadjeu Maurice Tadadjeu (1950-2012 in Cameroon) was a Vice-President of the African Union's Economic, Social and Cultural Council of Central Africa.
He was a co-creator of the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages in the late 1970s.
In 1996 he became ...
and Etienne Sadembouo were central to this effort.
Consonants
** Like , but with the top hook turned to the left.
Aspirated consonants are written ''ph, th, kh'' etc. Palatalized and labialized consonants are ''py, ty, ky'' and ''pw, tw, kw'' etc. Retroflex consonants are written either ''Cr'' or with a cedilla: ''tr, sr'' or ''ţ, ş'', etc. Prenasalized consonants are ''mb, nd, ŋg'' etc. Preglottalized consonants are'' 'b, 'd, 'm'' etc. Geminant consonants are written double.
Vowels
Long vowels are written double. Nasal vowels may be written with a cedilla: ''a̧'' etc. or with a single following nasal consonant: ''aŋ'' etc. (presumably assimilating to any following consonant), in which case VN would be written with a double nasal: ''aŋŋ'' etc. Harmonic vowels are written with a sub-dot, as for .
Tones
Tone is written as in the IPA, with the addition of a vertical mark for mid-low tone: etc. Where rising and falling tones only occur on long vowels, they are decomposed: etc. The high tone mark is used for contrastive stress in languages that do not have tone.
See also
*Pan-Nigerian alphabet
The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs.
History
Several hundred ...
*Africa Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as d ...
*African reference alphabet
An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) ...
References
External links
General Alphabet of Cameroon LanguagesAlphabet camerounaisRésurrection des langues minoritaires
{{Languages of Cameroon
Latin alphabets
Writing systems of Africa
Languages of Cameroon
Multilingual orthographies
Phonetic alphabets