rising or falling tone is realized as a mid tone. For example, 'we, you', phonemically high-tone but phonetically rising because of the voiced consonant, is generally mid-tone in Ouidah. Orthography 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. Sample text From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Use Radio programs in Fon are broadcast on ORTB channels. Television programs in Fon is 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 External links 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) Gbe languages Languages of Benin Fon people