The Kom language (also Itaà Âikom) is the language spoken by the Kom people in Northwest Province in Cameroon. It is classified as a Central Ring language of the Grassfields, Southern Bantoid languages in the Niger-Congo language family. Kom is a tonal language with three tones.
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 (ÃÂè), eng (à Âà Â), and an apostrophe (âÂÂ). The digraphs ae and oe are also written as ligatures æ and à Â, respectively.
The orthography is mostly phonemic, although the characters ae, oe, ue, and â 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 (âÂÂÃÂ) over the vowel (e.g. kàe [] "four"), and the high-low falling tone [] is written with a circumflex (âÂÂÃÂ) over the vowel (e.g. kâf [] "armpit").