Fon

Fon belongs to the Gbe cluster, a chain of closely related varieties running along the coast and inland from southeastern Ghana through Togo and southern Benin into southwestern Nigeria. Ewe, Gen, Aja, Gun and Fon are its principal members, and the boundaries between them are political and cultural at least as much as linguistic. Gbe sits in the Kwa branch of Niger-Congo.

It is tonal, and tone does grammatical as well as lexical work, so a transcription that omits tone marks loses information that a reader of ritual texts needs. Its morphology is largely isolating: relations that a European language would carry in endings are carried by separate words and by serial verb constructions, where a string of verbs shares one subject and describes one complex event.

Fon rose to prominence with the kingdom that spoke it. Dahomey, centred on Abomey, expanded southward to the coast in the eighteenth century and took the ports through which the Atlantic trade in captives ran, and the language of the court became a language of consequence along the whole Slave Coast. It is written today in a Latin alphabet extended with the additional letters and tone marks of the Africa alphabet, an orthography introduced in the twentieth century. There was no indigenous script.

Fon is now the most widely spoken language of Benin, used as a lingua franca in the south well beyond the communities that hold it as a first language, while French remains the language of the state and of schooling.

Vodun is a Fon word, and it is the clearest case in the atlas of a single term travelling from one West African language into the vocabulary of three continents. It names a deity or a spiritual power, and it entered Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese, French and English, acquiring in the last of these a set of sensational associations that have nothing to do with its meaning in Fon.

Inside Benin the language carries a religious register that is not open to everyone. The vodun have praise names and salutations that are learned rather than looked up; the songs of the convent belong to the period of seclusion in which initiates are taught them; and the verses attached to the Fa divination signs are a memorised corpus held by diviners. Public festivals are attended by anyone. The initiatory material is not public, and the atlas records that it exists and is restricted rather than setting it out.

What crossed the Atlantic crossed as language. Captives shipped through Ouidah and from Allada carried Fon names for deities, and those names are still spoken in the Americas. The Rada rite of Haitian Vodou takes its name from Allada. Legba, Damballa and other Haitian lwa carry Fon or Gbe names, and the liturgical songs of Haitian, Cuban and Brazilian houses preserve phrases whose speakers no longer parse them as sentences but transmit them exactly, which is why they can still be recognised on the African side.