The shortest alphabet in the world has only 12 letters. This alphabet is called Rotokas, the inhabitants of Bougainville Island in the Pacific Ocean, the largest in the Solomon Islands group, speak the language to which it belongs.
The shortest alphabet in the world
Writing on the island of Bougainville was introduced by European colonists in the 18th century, during the legendary round-the-world travels of James Cook and his followers. The basis of the Rotokas alphabet is Latin. The letters a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, v and u are taken from it. Also noteworthy is the fact that rotokas contains the smallest number of consonants - only seven.
The language is extremely rare, the number of its speakers is only four thousand people. Linguists classify this language as one of the Eastern Papuan group of Papus languages, numbering about seventy thousand speakers. Despite such a small number of Rotokas speakers, it differs into three dialects: anti, pipinaya and central. There are no semantic stresses and tones in the language, and all vowels have short and long forms. Words are stressed on different syllables depending on their number. In words that consist of two or three syllables, the stress is usually placed on the first syllable, in words with four syllables, on the first or third, and out of five, on the third. However, there are also exceptions to the rule. In addition, this alphabet is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the language with the least number of letters.
History of the discovery of Bougainville Island
Bougainville Island is located in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Australia. It is part of the island state of Papua New Guinea and belongs to the Solomon Islands group, being the largest in the group. Its area is almost 10 thousand square kilometers, which is comparable to the territory of Cyprus. The population is over 120 thousand people. One of the world's largest copper deposits is located on the island. After two unsuccessful attempts to declare independence, the island in 1997 received the status of an autonomous region with broad powers.
The island got its current name in honor of the great French navigator and pioneer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who led the First French round-the-world expedition in 1766-1768.
Studies of the Rotokas language
The Rotokas language is very little studied. Most of the language research has been carried out by Australian philologists Irwin Firchow and Stuart Robinson. The first published the English-language research results of Rotokas grammar, and the second studied the peculiarities of dialects of this language for a long time. Largely thanks to the writings of Firchow and Robinson, the Old Testament was partially translated into Rotokas in 1969, and the full text of the New Testament was published in 1982.
