Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...

which is part of

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

. According to Allen and Hurd (1963), there are three identified dialects: Central Rotokas ("Rotokas Proper"), Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia; with a further dialect spoken in Atsilima (Atsinima) village with an unclear status. Central Rotokas is most notable for its extremely small

phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...

inventory and for having perhaps the smallest modern alphabet.

Phonology

The Central dialect of Rotokas possesses one of the world's smallest phoneme inventories. (Only the

Pirahã language Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is the only survivi ...

has been claimed to have fewer.) The alphabet consists of twelve letters, representing eleven

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s. Rotokas has a vowel-length distinction (that is, all vowels have a short and long counterpart) but otherwise lacks distinctive suprasegmental features such as contrastive tone or stress.

Consonants

The consonant inventory embraces the following places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, and

velar Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive a ...

, each with a voiced and an unvoiced consonant. The three voiced members of the Central Rotokas dialect consonant phoneme inventory each have wide allophonic variation. Therefore, it is difficult to find a choice of

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners A ...

symbols to represent them which is not misleading. The voiceless consonants are straightforward

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...

stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...

s: . Robinson (2006) reports that has an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

in the Aita dialect before . Firchow & Firchow had reported the same for Central Rotokas, though Robinson contests it is not the case anymore due to widespread bilingualism with

Tok Pisin Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...

. The voiced consonants are the allophonic sets , , and . It is unusual for languages to lack phonemes whose primary allophone is a

nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...

. Firchow & Firchow (1969) have this to say on the lack of nasal phonemes in the Central Rotokas dialect (which they call ''Rotokas Proper''): "In Rotokas Proper ..nasals are rarely heard except when a native speaker is trying to imitate a foreigner’s attempt to speak Rotokas. In this case the nasals are used in the mimicry whether they were pronounced by the foreign speaker or not." Robinson shows that in the Aita dialect of Rotokas there is a three-way distinction required between voiced, voiceless, and nasal consonants. Hence, this dialect has nine consonant phonemes versus six for Rotokas Proper (though no

minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate ...

s were found between /g/ and /ŋ/). The voiced and nasal consonants in Aita are collapsed in Central Rotokas, i.e. it is possible to predict the Central Rotokas form from the Aita Rotokas form, but it is not possible to predict the Aita form from the Central form. For example, 'day' has /b ~ β/ in both Central and Aita Rotokas, but the second person plural pronoun in Central Rotokas starts with /b ~ β/, /bisi/, but with /m/ in its Aita cognate. Furthermore, Aita was found to have minimal pairs for the voiced labial and alveolar consonants: /buta/ 'time' vs. /muta/ 'taste'. This suggests that the consonant inventory of the ancestor language of Aita and Central Rotokas was more like Aita, and that the small phoneme inventory of Central Rotokas is a more recent innovation. There does not seem to be any reason for positing phonological manners of articulation (that is, ''plosive, fricative, nasal stop, tap'') in Central Rotokas. Rather, a simple binary distinction of ''voice'' is sufficient. Since a phonemic analysis is primarily concerned with distinctions, not with phonetic details, the symbols for voiced occlusives could be used: stop for Central Rotokas, and nasal for Aita dialect. (In the proposed alphabet for Central Rotokas, these are written . However, would work equally well.) In the chart below, the most frequent allophones are used to represent the phonemes.

Vowels

Vowels may be long (written doubled) or short. It is uncertain whether these represent ten phonemes or five; that is, whether 'long' vowels are distinct speech sounds or mere sequences of two vowels that happen to be the same. The Aita dialect appears not to distinguish length in vowels at all. Other vowel sequences are extremely common, as in the word ''upiapiepaiveira''.

Stress

It does not appear that stress is phonemic, but this is not certain. Words with 2 or 3 syllables are stressed on the initial syllable; those with 4 are stressed on the first and third; and those with 5 or more on the antepenultimate (third-last). This is complicated by long vowels, and not all verbal conjugations follow this pattern.

Grammar

Typologically, Rotokas is a fairly typical verb-final language, with

adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...

s and demonstrative pronouns preceding the

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

s they modify, and

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s following. Although

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...

s are fairly free in their ordering, they tend to precede the verb, as in the following example:

Orthography

The

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

is perhaps the smallest in use, with only 12 letters of

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets ( uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...

without any

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s and ligatures. The letters are ''A E G I K O P R S T U V''. ''T'' and ''S'' both represent the phoneme , written with ''S'' before an ''I'' and in the name 'Rotokas', and with ''T'' elsewhere. The ''V'' is sometimes written ''B''. A simpler alphabet has been proposed, using only ''A E I O U Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū P T K B D G'', (16 letters) using macrons for long vowels and arguably simpler spelling rules. However, it has never been put into common use.

Sample texts

Vocabulary

Selected basic vocabulary items in Rotokas:Firchow, Irwin B. and Jacqueline Firchow, compilers. 2008.
Rotokas-English dictionary
'. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. :

Footnotes

References

* Allen, Jerry & Conard Hurd. ''Languages of the Bougainville district.'' 1963. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. * Firchow, Irwin B., Jacqueline Firchow & David Akoitai
"Introduction"
''Vocabulary Rotokas-Pidgin-English,'' pp vii-xii. 1973. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. (Brief grammatical sketch.) * Firchow, Irwin
''Rotokas Grammar.''
1974. Unpublished manuscript. * Firchow, Irwin.
and Function of Rotokas Words".
1987. In ''Language and Linguistics in Melanesia'', vol. 15, pp. 5–111. * Firchow, Irwin B. & Jacqueline. "An abbreviated phonemic inventory". 1969. In ''Anthropological Linguistics'', vol. 11 #9, pp. 271–276. * Robinson, Stuart
"The Phoneme Inventory of the Aita Dialect of Rotokas".
2006. In ''Oceanic Linguistics'', vol. 45 #1, pp. 206–209. * Wurm, Stephen & S. Hattori. ''Language atlas of the Pacific area.'' 1981. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities.