Rotokas language

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{{language |name=Rotokas |states=Papua New Guinea |region=Bougainville |speakers=4,320 |familycolor=Papuan |fam1=East Papuan (geographic) |fam2=North Bougainville |fam3=Rotokas-Eivo |iso2=paa|iso3=roo}}

Rotokas is a language (part of the East Papuan language family) spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. There are at least three dialects of the language: Central Rotokas ("Rotokas Proper"), Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia. Central Rotokas is most notable for its extremely small phonemic inventories and for having perhaps the smallest modern alphabet.

1 Phonology
2 Grammar
3 References

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Phonology

The Rotokas alphabet is perhaps the smallest in use (only Pirahã has been claimed to have fewer speech sounds, but it is not written). It consists of the twelve letters A E I G K O P R S T U V, comprising six consonants (P T/S K V R G) and five or ten vowels (A E I O U). The phoneme /t/ is written either T or S, the latter before an I and in the name 'Rotokas'. In addition to this extremely small phonemic inventory, the language has no tones and does not appear to have contrastive stress.

With only six consonants, it's difficult to choose IPA symbols to represent Rotokas without being misleading. The places of articulation are bilabial, alveolar, and velar, each with a voiced and an unvoiced phoneme. The voiceless consonants are straightforward as plosive [p, t, k]; there is an alveolar allophone [ts]~[s], but this only occurs before [i]. However, there is a great deal of variation among the voiced consonants, with allophonic sets Template:IPA, Template:IPA, and Template:IPA.

Firchow & Firchow (anthropological linguistics) have this to say on the subject:

In the Aita dialect the nasal [allophones] predominate. [...] In Rotokas Proper, however, 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.

There does not seem to be any reason for positing phonological manners of articulation (that is, fricative, approximant, tap, stop, lateral) in Rotokas. Rather, a simple binary distinction of voice is sufficient, at least in Rotokas proper. In the Aita dialect of Rotokas, a three-way distinction is required between voiced, voiceless, and nasal consonants.

Note that when an [l] and [r] are given as variants, without their being determined by their environment, it's likely that they are actually either a lateral flap, Template:IPA, or else a flap that is consistently ambiguous as to centrality (that is, neither specifically Template:IPA nor Template:IPA, as in Japanese), and that the linguist has mistranscribed the sound.

Since a phonemic analysis is primarily concerned with distinctions, not with phonetic details, the symbols for voiced stops could be used: plosive [b, d, g] for Rotokas Proper, and nasal [m, n, ŋ] for Aita dialect. (In the proposed orthography for Rotokas Proper, 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, without a decision being made on the laterality of the flap.

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Consonants

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Voiceless	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Voiced	Template:IPA	Template:IPA	Template:IPA

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Vowels

Template:IPA (Template:IPA)

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. Other vowel sequences are extremely common, as in the word upiapiepaiveira.

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Stress

It does not appear that stress is phonemic, but this is not certain. Words with 2-3 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.

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Grammar

Typologically, Rotokas is a fairly typical verb-final language, with adjectives and demonstrative pronouns preceding the nouns they modify, and postpositions following. However, most adverbs follow the main verb.

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