Kom language (Cameroon)

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]

Kom
Itaŋikom
Native to	Cameroon
Region	North-West Province
Native speakers	210,000 (2005)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Southern Bantoid Grassfields Ring Center Kom
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bkm
Glottolog	komc1235
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Phonology

Consonants

Kom consonants^[3]

	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

Vowels

Kom vowels^[3][4]

	Front		Central	Back
Close	i	y	ɨ	u
Mid	e	œ		o
Open	æ		a

Orthography

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.

Kom alphabet^[5]

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]