Fon (, ) is spoken in Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Gabon by approximately 1.7 million speakers, and is the language of the Fon people. 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.

To date, there are about 53 different dialects of the Fon language spoken throughout Benin.

Phonology

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.  and  are also nasalized before nasal vowels, and  may be assimilated to  before .

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

Tone 
Fon has two phonemic tones:  and .  is realized as rising (low–high) after a voiced consonant. Basic disyllabic words have all four possibilities: –, –, –, and –.

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  after  (without triggering downstep) and to  before .

{|class="wikitable IPA"
|-
| / xʷèví-sà-tɔ́||é ||kò ||xɔ̀ ||àsɔ̃́ || wè /
|-
|[ xʷèvísáꜜtɔ́ ‖ ||é ||kó ||ꜜxɔ̂ | || àsɔ̃́ ||wê ‖ ]
|-
| fish-sell-aɡent||s/he |||| buy ||crab ||two
|}

"The fishmonger, she bought two crabs"

In Ouidah, a 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.

Orthographies

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 alphabet
Speakers in Benin also use a unique alphabet called Gbékoun invented by Togbédji Adigbè Houéssè.

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 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