Yemba Alphabet

Yemba, also called Dschang or Bamileke-Dschang after its main town, is written with the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, the shared spelling system agreed in 1979 for the country's own languages. It keeps the plain Latin letters the language needs and adds letters for sounds that English and French have no letter for. A current Yemba grapheme list runs A B C D E Ə Ɛ F G H ʼ I J K L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P PF R S SH T TS U Ʉ V W Y Z. The glottal stop ʼ has no capital or small form; q and x are absent, while r and the digraphs pf, sh, and ts are included.

Unicode's locale data does not provide a Yemba alphabet list, so this page follows a current Yemba spelling system based on the Cameroonian alphabet. Primers and dictionaries from Dschang can differ in how they list graphemes; pf, sh, and ts are digraphs written with ordinary Latin letters. The special characters are ɛ ɔ ə ʉ ŋ ʼ, with acute and macron tone marks where needed.

What ɛ, ɔ, ə, ʉ, ŋ and ʼ stand for

The extra vowels come from the International Phonetic Alphabet, where each letter stands for one sound. Ɛ ɛ (open e) is close to the vowel of English bed, while plain e is higher, nearer French é. Ɔ ɔ (open o) is close to the vowel of British law, while plain o is the o of go. Ə ə (schwa) is the short, relaxed vowel at the start of English about. Ʉ ʉ (u with a bar) is a u said with the tongue pushed forward, between the vowels of French tout and tu. Ŋ ŋ (eng) is the ng of sing, and in Yemba it can begin a word as well as end one.

The apostrophe-like ʼ is a full letter, not punctuation: it writes the glottal stop, the catch in the throat heard in the middle of English uh-oh. The right character is the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC), which software treats as part of the word; the curly quote ’ and the straight ' look almost the same and are what most people type, but they can split the word in search, sorting and spell-checking.

Watch for look-alikes when you copy: Ɛ ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε, Ɔ is not the reversed c Ↄ, and Unicode has two schwa pairs, ə with capital Ə (used here, as in other Cameroonian alphabets) and the turned e ǝ with capital Ǝ. Pick one pair and keep to it in a document.

Tone marks: á ā and ɛ́ ɔ̄ ə́ ʉ̄

Yemba is a tonal language: pitch can change a word's meaning, and its spelling marks high tone with an acute (á) and mid tone with a macron (ā); low tone is unmarked. Tone marks can also appear over syllabic nasals, as in ḿ and ń.

The tones of Dschang are famous among linguists: a high tone can be stepped down a notch after another, again and again across a sentence, and the language has long been a textbook case of this downstep. That is also why writing tone in Yemba is a real question, not a detail. Unicode has precomposed acute and macron letters for a, e, i, o, and u, as well as acute m and n (ḿ, ń). For ɛ, ɔ, ə, ʉ, and ŋ, it has no precomposed high- or mid-tone forms, so add a combining mark after the letter: ɛ with a combining acute gives ɛ́, and ɔ with a combining macron gives ɔ̄. If the mark lands beside the letter instead of over it, try a font made for African alphabets, such as Noto Sans, Charis SIL, or Gentium.

How to type Yemba letters on a keyboard and phone

The simplest way on any device is a free Cameroon keyboard from Keyman, which exists for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone in both AZERTY and QWERTY versions and puts ɛ ɔ ə ʉ ŋ ʼ and the tone marks on keys. Without one, copy the letters from the grid above.

In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B ɛ, 0190 Ɛ, 0254 ɔ, 0186 Ɔ, 0259 ə, 018F Ə, 0289 ʉ, 0244 Ʉ, 014B ŋ, 014A Ŋ and 02BC ʼ; for Yemba, type 0301 after a letter for high tone or 0304 for mid tone; low tone is unmarked. With the US-International layout, ' then a gives á; on a Mac, Option+E then a gives á. On a phone, use its accented-letter options for forms such as á, and save ɛ ɔ ə ʉ ŋ as text replacements. In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, ɔ for ɔ, ə for ə, ʉ for ʉ and ŋ for ŋ.

Where Yemba is spoken

Yemba is spoken in the Menoua department of Cameroon's West Region, in the green highlands around Dschang, a university town whose colonial history began as a German military station and administrative center, and in the surrounding chiefdoms. The CLDR population data estimates roughly 500,000 speakers, all of them in Cameroon, and many people of Dschang origin also live in Douala, Yaoundé and abroad. French is the language of school and administration in the region, so many speakers also read and write French, and French « » quotation marks are a familiar style there.

It belongs to the Bamileke group of Grassfields Bantu languages. Its neighbours and relatives have their own collections on this site: Ngiemboon next door, Ghomala' around Bafoussam and Bandjoun and Medumba around Bangangté use the same Cameroonian letters, Kom is a Grassfields language of the North-West, and the Bamun collection covers the language of Foumban, famous for King Njoya's own script. The Cameroon collection gathers the flag 🇨🇲, emoji and the letters of the country's main languages, and the French and English collections cover the two official languages.