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 +Kom consonants Bilabial Labio-dental Alveolar Palatal Labial-velar Velar Plosive Fricative Nasal Approximant Lateral
Vowels +Kom vowels Front Central Back Close Mid Open
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: barred I (Ɨɨ), eng (Ŋŋ), and an apostrophe (’). The digraphs ae and oe are also written as ligatures æ and œ, respectively. + Kom alphabet Letters a ae b ch d e f g gh i ɨ j ’ k l m n ŋ ny o oe s t u ue v w y z IPA
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").
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
Kom - English dictionary Article about Kom language