Rotokas language
| Rotokas | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Papua New Guinea |
| Region | Bougainville |
|
Native speakers
|
(4,300 cited 1981) |
|
North Bougainville
|
|
| Dialects |
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | roto1249 |
Rotokas is a language isolate spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of New Guinea which is part of Papua New Guinea. 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 inventory and for having perhaps the smallest modern alphabet.
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, though Robinson contests it's not the case anymore due to widespread bilingualism with Tok Pisin. The voiced consonants are the allophonic sets [β, b, m], [ɾ, n, l, d], and [ɡ, ɣ, ŋ].
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