| Fon | |
| Nativename: | fɔ̀ngbè |
| States: | Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Gabon |
| Ethnicity: | Fon people |
| Speakers: | million |
| Date: | 2019–2021 |
| Ref: | e26 |
| Dia1: | Agbome |
| Dia2: | Arohun |
| Dia3: | Gun |
| Dia4: | Gbekon |
| Dia5: | Kpase |
| Familycolor: | Niger-Congo |
| Fam2: | Atlantic–Congo |
| Fam3: | Volta-Congo |
| Fam4: | Volta–Niger |
| Fam5: | Gbe |
| Iso2: | fon |
| Script: | Latin, Gbékoun |
| Iso3: | fon |
| Ld2: | Maxi |
| Glotto: | fonn1241 |
| Glottoname: | Fon language |
| Glottorefname: | Fon |
| Notice: | IPA |
| Map: | Gbe languages.png |
| Mapcaption: | Gbe languages. Fon is purple. |
Fon (Fon: fɔ̀ngbè, pronounced as /ee/[1]) also known as Dahomean is the language of the Fon people. It belongs to the Gbe group within the larger Atlantic–Congo family. It is primarily spoken in Benin, as well as in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Gabon, by approximately 2.28 million speakers. Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an isolating language with a SVO basic word order.
In Benin, French is the official language, and Fon and other indigenous languages, including Yom and Yoruba, are classified as national languages.[2]
The standardized Fon language is part of the Fon cluster of languages inside the Eastern Gbe languages. Hounkpati B Christophe Capo groups Agbome, Kpase, Gun, Maxi and Weme (Ouémé) in the Fon dialect cluster, although other clusterings are suggested. Standard Fon is the primary target of language planning efforts in Benin, although separate efforts exists for Gun, Gen, and other languages of the country.[3]
Fon has seven oral vowel phonemes and five nasal vowel phonemes.
| Oral | Nasal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| front | back | front | back | ||
| Close | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |
| Close-Mid | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||
| Open-mid | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |
| pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Labial -velar | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Nasal" | pronounced as /ink/ ~ pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ ~ pronounced as /ink/ | |||||||||||||||||
| Occlusive | style=border-right:0 | (pronounced as /ink/) | style=border-left:0 | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | |
| Fricative | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-right:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | style=border-left:0 | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /ink/ ~ pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ ~ pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||||||||||||
The only consonant clusters in Fon have pronounced as //l// or pronounced as //j// as the second consonant. After (post)alveolars, pronounced as //l// is optionally realized as pronounced as /[ɾ]/: Fon: klɔ́ 'to wash', Fon: wlí 'to catch', Fon: jlò pronounced as /[d͡ʒlò] ~ [d͡ʒɾò]/ 'to want'.
Fon has two phonemic tones: high and low. High is realized as rising (low–high) after a voiced consonant. Basic disyllabic words have all four possibilities: high–high, high–low, low–high, and low–low.
In longer phonological words, such as verb and noun phrases, a high tone tends to persist until the final syllable, which, if it has a phonemic low tone, becomes falling (high–low). Low tones disappear between high tones, but their effect remains as a downstep. Rising tones (low–high) simplify to high after high (without triggering downstep) and to low before high.
In Ouidah, a rising or falling tone is realized as a mid tone. For example, Fon: mǐ 'we, you', phonemically high-tone pronounced as //bĩ́// but phonetically rising because of the voiced consonant, is generally mid-tone pronounced as /[mĩ̄]/ in Ouidah.
The Fon alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters Ɖ/ɖ, Ɛ/ɛ, and Ɔ/ɔ, and the digraphs gb, hw, kp, ny, and xw.[5]
| Majuscule | A | B | C | D | Ɖ | E | Ɛ | F | G | GB | H | HW | I | J | K | KP | L | M | N | NY | O | Ɔ | P | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | XW | Y | Z | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minuscule | a | b | c | d | ɖ | e | ɛ | f | g | gb | h | hw | i | j | k | kp | l | m | n | ny | o | ɔ | p | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | xw | y | z | |
| Sound (IPA) | pronounced as /a/ | pronounced as /b/ | pronounced as /t͡ɕ/ | pronounced as /d/ | pronounced as /ɖ/ | pronounced as /e/ | pronounced as /ɛ/ | pronounced as /f/ | pronounced as /ɡ/ | pronounced as /ɡb/ | pronounced as /ɣ/ | pronounced as /ɣʷ/ | pronounced as /i/ | pronounced as /d͡ʑ/ | pronounced as /k/ | pronounced as /kp/ | pronounced as /l/ | pronounced as /m/ | pronounced as /n/ | pronounced as /ɲ/ | pronounced as /o/ | pronounced as /ɔ/ | pronounced as /p/ | pronounced as /r/ | pronounced as /s/ | pronounced as /t/ | pronounced as /u/ | pronounced as /v/ | pronounced as /w/ | pronounced as /x/ | pronounced as /xʷ/ | pronounced as /j/ | pronounced as /z/ |
Tones are marked as follows:
Tones are fully marked in reference books, but not always marked in other writing. The tone marking is phonemic, and the actual pronunciation may be different according to the syllable's environment.[6]
See main article: Gbékoun script. Speakers in Benin also use a distinct script called Gbékoun that was invented by Togbédji Adigbè.[7] [8] It has 24 consonants and 9 vowels, as it is intended to transcribe all the languages of Benin.
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels.
Television programs in Fon are shown on the La Beninoise satellite TV channel.[9]
French used to be the only language of education in Benin, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the government is experimenting with teaching some subjects in Benin schools in the country's local languages, among them Fon.[10] [11] [12]
There is an effort to create a machine translator for Fon (to and from French), by Bonaventure Dossou (from Benin) and Chris Emezue (from Nigeria).[13] Their project is called FFR.[14] It uses phrases from Jehovah's Witnesses sermons as well as other biblical phrases as the research corpus to train a Natural Language Processing (NLP) neural net model.[15]