Rotokas language

Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea.
Central Rotokas is most notable for its extremely small phonemic consonantal inventory, which lacks phonemic nasals.

Dialects

According to Allen and Hurd, there are three identified dialects: Central Rotokas, Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia; with a further dialect spoken in Atsilima 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 distinction between long and short, but otherwise lacks distinctive suprasegmental features such as tone, and probably stress.

Consonants

Whereas Central Rotokas has only six consonantal phonemes, Aita Rotokas has nine; Aita adds phonemic nasals. 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, but voiced plosives in Central can correspond to either nasals or voiced plosives in Aita.

Central Rotokas

Consonants occur in three places of articulation: 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, or when trying to imitate a foreigner speaking Rotokas.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Voiceless
Voiced

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.

Aita Rotokas

The Aita dialect has nine consonant phonemes, with a three-way distinction required between voiced, voiceless, and nasal consonants.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Voiceless
Voiced
Nasal

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.

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Close-mid
Open

Orthography

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

Vocabulary

Selected basic vocabulary items in Rotokas: