HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Yom, or Pilapila, and formerly ''Kiliŋa'' or ''Kilir'', is a Gur language of
Benin Benin, officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It was formerly known as Dahomey. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north-west, and Niger to the north-east. The majority of its po ...
. It is spoken in the town of
Djougou Djougou is the largest city in northwestern Benin. It is an important market town. The commune covers an area of 3,966 square kilometres and as of 2002 had a population of 237.040 people. Djougou is home to a constituent monarchy. General info ...
and the surrounding area by the Yoa-Lokpa people. A very closely related dialect called ''taŋgələm'' is also spoken by the Taneka people.


Phonology

Where it differs from the IPA symbol, the conventional orthography is given below the phoneme.


Vowels

In Yom orthography, long vowels are written as double vowels, e.g. for .


Consonants

Generally, /l/ is realised by �in medial and final position. For some speakers, the two allophones are in free variation. Previously was used instead of .


Grammar


Genders

Nouns are divided into genders or noun classes which can be distinguished by the pronoun used to refer to them and by their suffix, which generally bears some resemblance to the pronoun. If the noun is modified by adjectives, then the suffix appears on the adjectives and not on the noun. The table gives the singular and plural forms of the pronouns used to refer to a noun of each gender. There are also some nouns which have the pronoun ''dÉ™'' or ''bÉ™'' without having a plural form.


Word order

Yom is predominantly an SVO language, although SOV word order is also possible. Genitives precede nouns and relative clauses follow. Adjectives, numerals and demonstratives follow the noun in that order and agree with it in number and gender. Many different constituents can preposed to the beginning of the sentence using a focus construction - for example: *, "I am eating my mango" *, "It's my mango that I'm eating"


References


Bibliography

* * {{Gur languages Oti–Volta languages Languages of Benin