Rotokas

Last Updated: 2019-07-18

Background

Language Family: East Papuan / Bougainville / West / Rotokas

• The Aita dialect of Rotokas has a few significant differences in its phoneme inventory; I will note these differences in this file, but my ruleset will only reflect the phonology of Central Rotokas.
• Rotokas is spoken in the Bougainville province of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

• The voiced consonants of Rotokas undergo a considerable degree of free variation, making the choice of underlying form - in the words of Robinson (2006) - “somewhat arbitrary” (p. 207). The bilabial and velar consonants are realized as either a stop, fricative, or nasal; the alveolar voiced consonants are realized as either a stop, nasal, flap, or lateral approximant. Firchow, Irwin and Firchow, Jacqueline (1969) list /β ɾ ɡ/ as the underlying voiced phonemes at each place of articulation (pp. 273-274); I have chosen to follow this analysis.
• For a more detailed explanation of the role of nasals in Rotokas, see the Misc. Rules section.

	Place of Articulation
	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Stops	p	t	k ɡ
Fricatives	β
Flaps		ɾ
Note: Phonemes to the left of each cell are voiceless and phonemes to the right of each cell are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Rotokas (Firchow, Irwin and Firchow, Jacqueline 1969, 271); however, this contrast has been lost in the Aita dialect (Robinson 2006, 209).
  • Vowel length is written by doubling the vowel character. (Firchow 1992, 1)
• Firchow (1992) argues for /ɑ/ rather than /a/ (p. 2).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
k	/k/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/t/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/β/

Syllable Structure

• The structure of Rotokas syllables is (C)V(V) (Firchow, Irwin and Firchow, Jacqueline 1969, 274–75).

Lenition Rules

• /d/ is most commonly realized as [ɾ] (Robinson 2006, 207).

Misc. Rules

• /t/ spirantizes to [s], or sometimes goes to [ts], before /i/ (Firchow, Irwin and Firchow, Jacqueline 1969, 274).
  • In recent years, however, this process has become less frequent; Robinson (2006) theorizes that this trend is because of bilingualism with Tok Pisin, which has contrastive /t/ and /s/ (p. 207).
• In the Aita dialect of Rotokas, voiced consonants are nasalized so often that the nasals /m n ŋ/ are held to be the underlying forms of those sounds; however, other dialects of Rotokas rarely nasalize voiced consonants unless deliberately trying to replicate foreign speech patterns (Firchow, Irwin and Firchow, Jacqueline 1969, 274).
• Robinson (2006), meanwhile, actually finds the nasals to be contrastive with the voiced stops in the Aita dialect (p. 208); in his view, there was a historical contrast between those two series that has since collapsed in standard Central Rotokas.

References

Firchow, Jacqueline. 1992. “Rotokas Organised Phonology Data.” SIL International.

Firchow, Irwin, and Firchow, Jacqueline. 1969. “An Abbreviated Phoneme Inventory.” Anthropological Linguistics 11: 271–76.

Robinson, Stuart. 2006. “The Phoneme Inventory of the Aita Dialect of Rotokas.” Oceanic Linguistics 45: 206–9.