Rotokas language

The Central dialect of Rotokas possesses one of the world's smallest phoneme inventories. (Only the Pirahã language has been claimed to have fewer.) The alphabet consists of twelve letters, representing eleven phonemes. 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.

The consonant inventory embraces the following places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, and velar, 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 symbols to represent them which is not misleading. The voiceless consonants are straightforward voiceless stop consonants: /p, t, k/ [p, t, k]. Robinson (2006) reports that t has an allophone [ts]~[s] in the Aita dialect before /i/. Firchow & Firchow had reported the same for Central Rotokas,^[5] though Robinson contests it is not the case anymore due to widespread bilingualism with Tok Pisin.^[6] The voiced consonants are the allophonic sets [β, b, m], [ɾ, n, l, d], and [ɡ, ɣ, ŋ].

It is unusual for languages to lack phonemes whose primary allophone is a nasal. 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."^[7]

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 pairs were found between /g/ and /ŋ/).^[8] 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 not vice versa. For example, bokia '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 (e.g., plosive, fricative, nasal, 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 ⟨b, d, ɡ⟩ for Central Rotokas, and nasal ⟨m, n, ŋ⟩ for Aita dialect. (In the proposed alphabet for Central Rotokas, these are written ⟨v, r, g⟩. However, ⟨b, d, g⟩ would work equally well.) In the chart below, the most frequent allophones are used to represent the phonemes.

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.^[9] Other vowel sequences are extremely common, as in the word upiapiepaiveira.

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.

Typologically, Rotokas is a fairly typical verb-final language, with adjectives and demonstrative pronouns preceding the nouns they modify, and postpositions following. Although adverbs are fairly free in their ordering, they tend to precede the verb, as in the following example:

The alphabet is perhaps the smallest in use, with only 12 letters of ISO basic Latin alphabet without any diacritics and ligatures. The letters are A E G I K O P R S T U V. T and S both represent the phoneme /t/, 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.

Selected basic vocabulary items in Rotokas:^[10]

gloss	Rotokas
bird	kokioto
blood	revasiva
bone	kerua
breast	rorooua
ear	uvareoua
eat	aio
egg	takura
eye	osireito
fire	tuitui
give	vate
go	ava
ground	rasito
hair	orui
hear	uvu
leg	kokotoa
louse	iirui
man	rare pie
moon	kekira
name	vaisia
one	katai
road, path	raiva
see	keke
sky	vuvuiua
stone	aveke
sun	ravireo
tongue	arevuoto
tooth	reuri
tree	evaova
two	erao
water	uukoa
woman	avuo

• Allen, Jerry; Hurd, Conard (1963). Languages of the Bougainville district. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
• Firchow, Irwin (1974). Rotokas Grammar (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-04-01. (Unpublished manuscript)
• Firchow, Irwin (1987). "Form and Function of Rotokas Words". Language and Linguistics in Melanesia. 15 (1–2): 5–111. ISSN 0023-1959. Archived from the original on 2019-07-05.
• Firchow, Irwin B.; Firchow, Jacqueline (2008). Rotokas-English dictionary. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
• Firchow, Irwin B.; Firchow, Jacqueline (1969). "An abbreviated phonemic inventory". Anthropological Linguistics. 11 (9): 271–276. JSTOR 30029468.
• Firchow, Irwin B.; Firchow, Jacqueline; Akoitai, David (1973). "Introduction". Vocabulary Rotokas-Pidgin-English. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. vii–xii. (Brief grammatical sketch)
• Robinson, Stuart (2006). "The Phoneme Inventory of the Aita Dialect of Rotokas" (PDF). Oceanic Linguistics. 45 (1): 206–209. doi:10.1353/ol.2006.0018. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0013-192E-4. JSTOR 4499953. S2CID 145809531.
• Wurm, Stephen; Hattori, S. (1981). Language atlas of the Pacific area. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities. ISBN 9780858832398.

• Firchow, Jackie (1992). Organised Phonology Data. Archived from the original on 2023-12-09.
• Robinson, Stuart (2011). Split intransitivity in Rotokas, a Papuan language of Bougainville (PDF) (PhD thesis). Nijmegen: Ipskamp Printers. hdl:2066/85822. Retrieved 6 January 2022.