| Kom | |
|---|---|
| Itaŋikom | |
| Native to | Cameroon |
| Region | North-West Province |
Native speakers | 210,000 (2005)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | bkm |
| Glottolog | komc1235 |
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.[2] Kom is a tonal language with three tones.[2]
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Alveolar | Palatal | Labial- velar |
Velar | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | b | t | d | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | |||||
| Fricative | f | v | s | z | ɣ | |||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||
| Approximant | j | w | ||||||||||
| Lateral | l | |||||||||||
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | y | ɨ | u |
| Close-mid | e | œ | o | |
| Open | æ | a | ||
Kom uses a 29-character Latin-script orthography based on the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages.[4] 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.
| 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[2] | /a/ | /æ/ | /b/ | /c/ | /d/ | /e/ | /f/ | /g/ | /ɣ/ | /i/ | /ɨ/ | /ɟ/ | /ʔ/ | /k/ | /l/ | /m/ | /n/ | /ŋ/ | /ɲ/ | /o/ | /œ/ | /s/ | /t/ | /u/ | /y/ | /v/ | /w/ | /j/ | /z/ |
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 /k/.
Although Kom has eight phonetic tones,[3] only two are marked in writing: the low tone [˨] is written with a grave accent (◌̀) over the vowel (e.g. kàe [kæ̀] "four"), and the high-low falling tone [˦˨] is written with a circumflex (◌̂) over the vowel (e.g. kâf [kâf] "armpit").[5]
