Kom language (Cameroon)

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The Kom language (also Itaŋikom) is the language spoken by the Kom people in Northwest Province in Cameroon. It is classified as a Central Ring language of the Grassfields, Southern Bantoid languages in the Niger-Congo language family. Kom is a tonal language with three tones.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Orthography

Kom uses a 29-character Latin-script orthography based on the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages. It contains 20 single characters from the ISO set, six digraphs, and three special characters: Ɨ|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, although the characters ae, oe, ue, and represent allophonic 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").

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