Encyclopedia > Rotokas language

  Article Content

Rotokas language

Rotokas is a language spoken in Bougainville, an island to the East of Papua New Guinea. Its main claim to fame, linguistically speaking, is that it reputed to possess the world's smallest phonemic inventory: 6 consonants (K,P,R,S,T,V) and 5 vowels (A,E,I,O,U). Only Pirahã has less.

Thus, the Rotokas alphabet consists of the eleven letters AEIKOPRSTUV.

The phonemes of Rotokas, in SAMPA notation, are as follows:

              Bilabial   Alveolar   Velar
 Vl. stop      p          t          k
 Vd. fricative B
 Vl. fricative            s
 Vd. tap                  4

Vowels A e i o u

In the orthography, v stands for SAMPA /B/.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Bugatti

... its success in early Grand Prix racing, winning the first ever Monaco Grand Prix and with driver Jean-Pierre Wimille[?] they won the 1937 and 1939 24 hours of Le ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 24.3 ms