The Kom language, Itaŋikom, is the language spoken by the Kom people of Cameroon. Shultz 1997a and Shultz 1997b (available online) contain a comprehensive description of the language's grammar. Kom is a tonal language with three tones. Phonology Consonants Vowels Orthography Kom uses a 29-character Latin-script orthography based on the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages. 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. 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 . Although Kom has eight phonetic tones, only two are marked in writing: the low tone [] is written with a grave accent (◌̀) over the vowel (e.g. kàe [] "four"), and the high-low falling tone [] is written with a circumflex (◌̂) over the vowel (e.g. kâf [] "armpit"). References Bibliography Shultz, George, 1997a, Kom Language Grammar Sketch Part 1, SIL Cameroon Shultz, George, 1997b, Notes on Discourse features of Kom Narrative Texts, SIL Cameroon Jones, Randy, compiler. 2001. Provisional Kom - English lexcion. Yaoundé, Cameroon: SIL External links Kom - English dictionary Article about Kom language Ring languages Languages of Cameroon