| Kom | |
| Nativename: | Itaŋikom |
| States: | Cameroon |
| Region: | North-West Province |
| Date: | 2005 |
| Ref: | e18 |
| Familycolor: | Niger-Congo |
| Fam2: | Atlantic–Congo |
| Fam3: | Benue–Congo |
| Fam4: | Southern Bantoid |
| Fam5: | Grassfields |
| Fam6: | Ring |
| Fam7: | Center |
| Iso3: | bkm |
| Glotto: | komc1235 |
| Glottorefname: | Kom (Cameroon) |
| Notice: | IPA |
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.
| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Labial- velar | Velar | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||||
| Lateral | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||||||
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close-mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Open | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
Kom uses a 29-character Latin-script orthography based on the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages.[2] 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[4] | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ |
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 pronounced as /link/.
Although Kom has eight phonetic tones, only two are marked in writing: the low tone [{{IPA|˨}}] is written with a grave accent (◌̀) over the vowel (e.g. kàe [{{IPA|kæ̀}}] "four"), and the high-low falling tone [{{IPA|˦˨}}] is written with a circumflex (◌̂) over the vowel (e.g. kâf [{{IPA|kâf}}] "armpit").