Fon language

Fon (fɔ̀ngbè, ) 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.

Cultural and legal status
In Benin, French is the official language, and Fon and other indigenous languages, including Yom and Yoruba, are classified as national languages.

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

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

Consonants
occurs only in linguistic mimesis and loanwords but is often is replaced by 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 and  are allophones. is in free variation with and so Fong can be argued to have no phonemic nasal consonants, a pattern rather common in West Africa. is nasalized (to ) before nasal vowels, and may assimilate to before. is sometimes also nasalized.

The only consonant clusters in Fon have or  as the second consonant. After (post)alveolars, is optionally realized as : klɔ́ 'to wash', wlí 'to catch', jlò  'to want'.

Tone
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, 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."

In Ouidah, a rising or falling tone is realized as a mid tone. For example, mǐ 'we, you', phonemically high-tone but phonetically rising because of the voiced consonant, is generally mid-tone  in Ouidah.

Roman alphabet
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.

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


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
 * Acɛ, susu kpo sisi ɖokpo ɔ kpo wɛ gbɛtɔ bi ɖo ɖò gbɛwiwa tɔn hwenu; ye ɖo linkpɔn bɔ ayi yetɔn mɛ kpe lo bɔ ye ɖo na do alɔ yeɖee ɖi nɔvinɔvi ɖɔhun.
 * 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.