| Fon | |
|---|---|
| fɔ̀ngbè | |
| Native to | Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Gabon |
| Ethnicity | Fon people |
Native speakers | 2.3 million (2019–2021)[1] |
| Dialects |
|
| Latin, Gbékoun | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Benin |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | fon |
| ISO 639-3 | fon |
| Glottolog | fonn1241 Fon language |
 Gbe languages. Fon is purple. | |
| This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. | |
| Person | Fon |
|---|---|
| People | Fon-nu |
| Language | fɔ̀ngbè |
| Country | Dahomey |
Fon (fɔ̀ngbè, pronounced [fɔ̃̀ɡ͡bē][2]) 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.[1] Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an isolating language with a SVO basic word order.
InBenin, French is the official language, and Fon and other indigenous languages, including Yom and Yoruba, are classified as national languages.[3]
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.[4]
Fon has seven oral vowel phonemes and five nasal vowel phonemes.
| Oral | Nasal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| front | back | front | back | |
| Close | i | u | ĩ | ũ |
| Close-Mid | e | o | ||
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɔ | ɛ̃ | ɔ̃ |
| Open | a | ã | ||
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Labial -velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Nasal" | m ~ b | n ~ ɖ | ||||||||
| Occlusive | (p) | t | d | tʃ | dʒ | k | ɡ | kp | ɡb | |
| Fricative | f | v | s | z | x | ɣ | xʷ | ɣʷ | ||
| Approximant | l ~ ɾ | ɲ ~ j | w | |||||||
/p/ occurs only in linguistic mimesis and loanwords but is often is replaced by /f/ in the latter, as in cɔ́fù 'shop'. Several of the voiced occlusives occur only before oral vowels, and the homorganic nasal stops occur only before nasal vowels, which indicates that [b] [m] and [ɖ] [n] are allophones. [ɲ] is in free variation with [j̃] and so Fong can be argued to have no phonemic nasal consonants, a pattern rather common in West Africa.[a] /w/ is nasalized (to[ŋʷ]) before nasal vowels, and may assimilate to [ɥ] before /i/. /l/ is sometimes also nasalized.[clarification needed]
The only consonant clusters in Fon have /l/or/j/ as the second consonant. After (post)alveolars, /l/ is optionally realized as [ɾ]: klɔ́ 'to wash', wlí 'to catch', jlò [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.
Hwevísatɔ́,
/xʷèví-sà-tɔ́
[xʷèvísáꜜtɔ́‖
fish-sell-agent
é
é
é
s/he
ko
kò
kó
PERF
hɔ
xɔ̀
ꜜxɔ̂
buy
asón
àsɔ̃́
àsɔ̃́
crab
we.
wè/
wê‖]
two
Hwevísatɔ́, é ko hɔ asón we.
/xʷèví-sà-tɔ́ é kò xɔ̀ àsɔ̃́ wè/
[xʷèvísáꜜtɔ́‖ é kó ꜜxɔ̂ àsɔ̃́ wê‖]
fish-sell-agent s/he PERF buy crab two
"The fishmonger, she bought two crabs."
InOuidah, a rising or falling tone is realized as a mid tone. For example, mǐ 'we, you', phonemically high-tone /bĩ́/ but phonetically rising because of the voiced consonant, is generally mid-tone [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.[6]
| 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) | a | b | t͡ɕ | d | ɖ | e | ɛ | f | ɡ | ɡb | ɣ | ɣʷ | i | d͡ʑ | k | kp | l | m | n | ɲ | o | ɔ | p | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | xʷ | j | 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.[7]
Speakers in Benin also use a distinct script called Gbékoun that was invented by Togbédji Adigbè.[8][9] 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
Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels.
Television programs in Fon are shown on the La Beninoise satellite TV channel.[10]
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.[11][12][13]
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).[14] Their project is called FFR.[15] 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.[16]
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