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 emph ...
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. Consonant and vowel letters are not to contain diacritics, though is a temporary excep ...
.
It contains 20 single characters from the
ISO set, six
digraphs, and three special characters:
barred I (Ɨɨ),
eng (Ŋŋ), and an
apostrophe (’). The digraphs ae and oe are also written as
ligatures æ and œ, respectively.
The orthography is mostly
phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
, 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 '' ...
variations: the three vowel digraphs are the product of
vowel coalescence, and the apostrophe represents the
glottal stop, 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 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
{{gras-lang-stub