A Language That Gets By on Just Twelve Letters

Most of the world’s writing systems juggle dozens of letters to capture a sprawl of sounds. Rotokas, spoken by roughly 4,000 people on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea, barely needs a handful.

Its core dialect, Central Rotokas, is famous among linguists for possessing one of the smallest phoneme inventories on Earth — just six consonants (p, t, k, b, r, g) and five vowels (a, e, i, o, u, which can be short or long). Only the Amazonian language Pirahã has been claimed to rival it for fewer distinct sounds.

Eleven sounds. Twelve letters. An entire language fits in the space most alphabets reserve for vowels.

That spareness carries straight into writing. The Rotokas alphabet uses just twelve Latin letters — a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, u, v — with no accents or special characters, developed in the mid-20th century by missionary linguists. It is widely cited as one of the shortest alphabets in active use, mapping almost one letter to each sound the language makes.