Ewondo Alphabet

Ewondo is written in the Latin alphabet. The General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, published in 1979, proposed a shared spelling standard, but its adoption varied between languages. Unicode's CLDR, the database that phones and computers take their language data from, records the Ewondo letters as A B D E Ə Ɛ F G H I K L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P R S T U V W Y Z, plus the tone-marked vowels and nasals. There is no C, J, Q or X, and the grid on this page follows exactly that set, in that order.

Four letters are not on an ordinary keyboard. Ə ə (schwa) is a short central vowel like the a of English about. Ɛ ɛ is an open e, close to the vowel of bed, and Ɔ ɔ an open o, close to the vowel of law, so e, ə and ɛ are three different vowels, and o and ɔ are two. Ŋ ŋ is the ng of English sing, and in Ewondo it can begin a syllable, which English never allows.

Other sounds are written with two letters rather than special characters, as across the General Alphabet: ny for the ny of canyon, and nasal clusters such as mb, nd and ng. Older names were fixed in French or German spellings before the standard alphabet existed, which is why the capital is Yaoundé with a French é, and why the neighbourhoods of Yaoundé carry Ewondo names in French dress: Mvog-Ada, Mvog-Mbi, Nkolbisson, Mvolyé.

Ewondo tone marks: what á, à, â and ǎ mean

Ewondo is a tonal Bantu language: the pitch of a syllable is part of the word, so two words spelled with the same letters can mean different things. A tone-explicit transcription distinguishes five tones: high, low, middle, rising and falling. It can mark them with an acute (á), grave (à), macron (ā), caron (ǎ) and circumflex (â), respectively; ordinary spelling often omits tone marks and usually leaves the low tone unmarked on vowels. A syllabic n can also carry a tone mark, as in ń and ǹ.

Unicode has ready-made tone letters for a, e, i, o and u and for ń and ǹ, so they stand in their own columns in the grid. There are no ready-made ə, ɛ or ɔ with tones. For those you type the base letter and then a combining mark: ɛ followed by the combining acute ́ gives ɛ́, ɔ followed by the combining caron ̌ gives ɔ̌, ə followed by the combining circumflex ̂ gives ə̂. The four marks are in the grid under Tone marks; paste them straight after the letter, never before it.

A ready-made é and an e followed by a combining acute look the same and count as the same text in Unicode, but some search boxes and spell checkers treat them differently. If a word you pasted is not found, retype its accented vowels with one method throughout.

How to type ɛ, ɔ, ə and ŋ on a keyboard, iPhone or Android

The quickest way is to copy them from this page. In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0190 for Ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0186 for Ɔ, 0259 for ə, 018F for Ə, 014B for ŋ and 014A for Ŋ. The combining tone marks work the same way, typed after the letter: 0301 high, 0300 low, 0302 falling, 030C rising. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input source in Keyboard settings, then hold Option and type the same codes.

For the plain tone vowels, the US-International layout on Windows types á with ' then a, à with then a, and â with ^ then a; Alt codes work too (Alt+0225 á, Alt+0224 à, Alt+0226 â, Alt+0233 é, Alt+0244 ô). On a Mac, Option+E then the vowel gives the acute, Option+ the grave and Option+I the circumflex, and the ABC Extended layout adds Option+V for the caron (ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ). On a phone, long-press a vowel for á à â.

For regular writing in Ewondo, install a keyboard made for Cameroonian languages: SIL's free Keyman keyboards for Cameroon come in AZERTY and QWERTY layouts for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone and put ɛ ɔ ə ŋ and the tone marks on keys. Without one, set up text replacements once (iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement; Android: your keyboard's personal dictionary) with short triggers such as ee, oo, ae and ng. In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, ɔ for ɔ, ə for ə and ŋ (or ŋ) for ŋ.

Watch the look-alikes. The small schwa ə (U+0259) looks exactly like the turned e ǝ (U+01DD), but their capitals differ, Ə and Ǝ; CLDR's Ewondo data pairs ə with Ə, and so does this page. ɛ is not the Greek ε (epsilon), and ŋ is not the Greek η (eta). They can look alike in some fonts but break search, sorting and spell checks.

Where the Ewondo language is spoken in Cameroon

Ewondo is the language of the Ewondo people, one of the Beti peoples of Cameroon's Centre Region, whose land lies in and around Yaoundé. CLDR estimates just under a million speakers, about 960,000. The capital takes its name from them: German explorers set up a station here in 1889 and called it Jaunde after the Ewondo, and the French spelling Yaoundé followed. Locals also call the city Ongola, an Ewondo name.

Ewondo belongs to the Beti-Fang group of Bantu languages (A72 in Guthrie's classification), together with Eton, Bulu and Fang, the language of northern Gabon and Equatorial Guinea; speakers of these languages follow one another to a large degree. Catholic missionaries, starting with the German Pallottines who founded the Mvolyé mission in Yaoundé in 1901, taught and preached in Ewondo, and it became a church language in much of central Cameroon.

Many Ewondo speakers also use French, one of Cameroon's two official languages, so French guillemets « » are as familiar as curly quotes “ ”, and prices are written the Cameroonian way, 5 000 FCFA, since the CFA franc has no Unicode sign. The Cameroon collection has the country's flag 🇨🇲 and its emoji; the Bulu, Fang, Basaa and French collections cover the neighbouring languages.