Fon (, ), also known as Dahomean or Beninese, 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 and Togo by approximately 2.3 million speakers.

Dialects

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 exist for Gun, Gen, and other languages of the country.

Phonology

thumb|right|"Welcome" (Kwabɔ) in Fon at a pharmacy at [[Cotonou Airport in Cotonou, Benin]]

Vowels

Fon has seven oral vowel phonemes and five nasal vowel phonemes.

{|class=wikitable style="text-align: center"

|+caption | Vowel phonemes of Fon

|-

!rowspan=2|

!colspan=2|Oral

!colspan=2|Nasal

|-

!<small>front</small>

!<small>back</small>

!<small>front</small>

!<small>back</small>

|-

!Close

|||||||

|-

!Close-Mid

|||||colspan=2|

|-

!Open-mid

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|-

!Open

|colspan=2|||colspan=2|

|}

Consonants

{|class=wikitable style=text-align:center

|+caption | Consonant phonemes of Fon

{| class="wikitable"

|+Fon alphabet

|-

! 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)

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

|}

Tone marking

Tones are marked as follows:

  • Acute accent marks the rising tone: xó, dó
  • Grave accent marks the falling tone: ɖò, akpàkpà
  • Caron marks falling and rising tone: bǔ, bǐ
  • Circumflex accent marks the rising and falling tone: côfù
  • Macron marks the neutral tone: kān

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.

Gbékoun script

thumb|Table of Gbékoun script

Speakers in Benin also use a distinct script called Gbékoun that was invented by Togbédji Adigbè.

It has 24 consonants and 9 vowels, as it is intended to transcribe all the languages of Benin.

Sample text

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.

Use

Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels.

Television programs in Fon are shown on the La Beninoise satellite TV channel.

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.

Machine translation efforts

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). Their project is called FFR. 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.

Notes

References

Bibliography

  • A Facebook application to use and learn the Fon language, developed by Jolome.com
  • The first blog totally in Fongbe. An access to a Fongbe forum is given
  • Journal of West African Languages: Articles on Fon
  • Manuel dahoméen : grammaire, chrestomathie, dictionnaire français-dahoméen et dahoméen-français, 1894 by Maurice Delafosse at the Internet Archive (in French)