The Gbe languages

Dictionnaire Fon–Français / Français–Fon

– avec une esquisse grammaticale

Author: Hildegard Höftmann †. In collaboration with: Michel Ahohounkpanzon, Cécile Boko. Series edited by: Herrmann Jungraithmayr, Norbert Cyffer, Rainer Voßen.

Series: WeStu Westafrikanische Studien Volume 27 + 35

Fon, together with Ewe and Ge, is ascribed to Kwa, a sub-grouping of the Niger Congo language family. Origin and distribution of Fon and its speakers centered in the former kingdom of Dahomey, now part of the Republic of Benin. Because the Fon expanded so dramatically, their language nowadays is one of the major languages used in Benin, with 40 to 45% of the inhabitants speaking Fon either as a native, secondary or vehicular language.

Outside of Benin, Fon is an important lingua franca in Westafrica and is spoken in Southwestern Nigeria, but also widespread in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo. In Southern Benin Fon is the major lingua franca, its speakers amount to about 1.7 million people.

In this package are included the Dictionnaire Fon– Français avec une esquisse grammaticale and the in 2012 published Dictionnaire Français–Fon.

Dictionnaire Fon–Français:
The Fon-French dictionary uses the standard orthography of Fon with an additional representation of five different levels of tone (high, low and middle, falling and rising). The pronunciation of each entry is given in square brackets, according to the rules of the Association Phonétique Internationale (API). A valuable bonus to the about 8,000 entries of the dictionary itself is provided by the approximately fifty pages dealing with Fon grammar, a complete if condensed grammar detailing all aspects of Fon language structure.

Dictionnaire Français–Fon:
This dictionary comprises approximately 5,000 entries, it appears subsequently to the Dictionnaire Fon–Français (2003) and – apart from the contained lexemes therein – it includes further headwords compiled from Fon-literature (journals, booklets/grey literature, official publications etc.) as well as from questionnaires sent to native speakers of the language. Furthermore, the corpus has been amended by modern technical terms from the subject areas of science, technology, medicine, botany, zoology, economics, as well as culture, politics and jurisprudence.

The Dictionnaire Français–Fon is enriched by an appendix of tables which illustrate in a compact form important pronouns and prepositions as well as the numerals from Zero to 1 billion.

Just as in her Dictionnaire Fon–Français, the author again uses the standard orthography of Fon with an additional representation of five different levels of tone (high, low and middle, falling and rising).

In addition to the dictionaries mentioned before, we published further studies on Fon in our programme, see the following links:

Accompanying material:

• Verbal Art of the Fon (Benin) (ISBN 978-3-89645-288-7)
• Vodun Stories of the Fon (Benin) (ISBN 978-3-89645-734-9)

Cross-reference:

• Dictionnaire Fon–Français (ISBN 978-3-89645-463-8)
• Dictionnaire Français–Fon (ISBN 978-3-89645-471-3)
• Le Maxi du Centre-Bénin et du Centre-Togo (ISBN 978-3-89645-031-9)
• Les emprunts linguistiques d’origine européenne en Fon (Nouveau Kwa, Gbe: Bénin) (ISBN 978-3-89645-036-4)
• Wörterbuch Swahili-Deutsch (ISBN 978-3-89645-165-1)

© 2024 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag – www.koeppe.de

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