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.

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.

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.

Whereas Central Rotokas has only six consonantal phonemes, Aita Rotokas has nine; Aita adds phonemic nasals (e.g. this example of a minimal pair, /buta/ 'time' vs. /muta/ 'taste'). 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 (e.g. "tree" is emaoto in Aita and ebaoto in Central), but voiced plosives in Central can correspond to either nasals or voiced plosives in Aita.

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 [β, b, m], [ɾ, n, l, d], and [ɡ, ɣ, ŋ]. 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 (e.g. "bye-bye" being pronounced [maemae]), or when trying to imitate a foreigner speaking Rotokas (even if they were not used by the foreigner).