Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on

Bougainville Island Bougainville Island (; Tok Pisin: ''Bogenvil'') is the main island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which is part of Papua New Guinea. Its land area is . The highest point is Mount Balbi, on the main island, at . The much smaller Buk ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. Central Rotokas is most notable for its extremely small phonemic consonantal inventory, which lacks

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

nasals.

Dialects

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.

Phonology

The Central dialect of Rotokas possesses one of the world's smallest phonemic consonantal inventories. Central Rotokas has a

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

distinction between long and short, but otherwise lacks distinctive

suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such ele ...

features such as tone, and probably stress.

Consonants

Whereas Central Rotokas has only six consonantal phonemes, Aita Rotokas has nine; Aita adds phonemic nasals (e.g. this example of a minimal pair, vs. ). The Central dialect's limited inventory likely arose by collapsing the phonemic distinction between nasals and non-nasals. Nasals in Aita always correspond to voiced plosives in Central (e.g. "tree" is in Aita and in Central), but voiced plosives in Central can correspond to either nasals or voiced plosives in Aita.

Central Rotokas

Consonants occur in three

places of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...

: bilabial, alveolar, and velar, each with a voiced and an unvoiced variant. The three voiced phonemes each have wide allophonic variation, with the allophonic sets , , and . This makes the choice of symbols for phonemes somewhat arbitrary. Nasals are rarely heard. They will sometimes be misused when speakers try to pronounce English words (e.g. "bye-bye" being pronounced ), or when trying to imitate a foreigner speaking Rotokas (even if they were not used by the foreigner). * In the 1960s, was described as being before . Later research in the 2000s found this to no longer be true, possibly due to widespread bilingualism with

Tok Pisin Tok Pisin ( ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh ; ), often referred to by English speakers as New Guinea Pidgin or simply Pidgin, is an English-based creole languages, English creole language spoken throughou ...

Aita Rotokas

The Aita dialect has nine consonant phonemes, with a three-way distinction required between voiced, voiceless, and nasal consonants. * varies between and . * is chiefly realized as . * is before .

Vowels

Vowels in the Central dialect may be long or short, but the Aita dialect seems to have no length distinction.

Orthography

The Rotokas orthography uses 12 letters of the Latin alphabet, with no

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 or ligatures. The letters are ''a'', ''e'', ''g'', ''i, k'', ''o'', ''p, r, s'', ''t'', ''u'' and ''v.'' Long vowels are written as doubled. /t/ is written as s before i and t elsewhere and has also been written with an orthography based on the IPA symbols for its phonemes.

Stress

Stress is probably not phonemic. 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. This is complicated by long vowels, and there are exceptions to the third rule among some verb constructions.

Grammar

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

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s and demonstrative pronouns preceding the

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

s they modify, and

postposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

s following. Although

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

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

Dialects

Phonology

Consonants

Central Rotokas

Aita Rotokas

Vowels

Orthography

Stress

Grammar

Vocabulary

Sample text

Footnotes

References

Further reading