Kom language (Cameroon)

The Kom language is the language spoken by the Kom [people (Cameroon)|Kom people] in Northwest [Region (Cameroon)|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.

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 [basic Latin alphabet|ISO set], six digraphs, and three special characters: barred I, eng, 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

International [Phonetic Alphabet|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, and the high-low falling tone is written with a circumflex over the vowel.