Rotokas

Rotokas is a Papuan language of Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea, and the main member of the Rotokas branch of the North Bougainville family. It is spoken in the centre of the island and splits into Central Rotokas, Aita Rotokas and Pipipaia dialects.

Central Rotokas holds one of the smallest sound systems known, with only six consonants and five vowels and no phonemic nasals, while the Aita dialect keeps nine consonants including nasals. The language is verb-final and is written with a twelve-letter Latin alphabet.

The first settlers of Bougainville reached the island in the Paleolithic past, and Austronesian seafarers arrived in the second millennium BCE. The first European to land was the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768, after whom the island is named.