[ Table of Contents | Next ]
The Rotokas language is spoken by approximately 3,600 people living in the Kieta and Buka Passage Sub-Districts of central Bougainville Island. The majority of the speakers are located on the easterri side of the island in villages built on the ridge surrounding the three main river systems in Aita and Rotokas census divisions of the Kieta Sub-District. There is a correlation between the three river-system areas and the three dialects of the Rotokas language: the Wakunai River area - Rotokas Proper, the Red River area - Pipipaia dialect, and the.Aita River area - Aita dialect. Also included in the Rotokas language is the Atsilima Sub-language which is located on the western side of the island in the Buka Passage Sub-District. (See Allen and Hurd 1963:21.)
Bougainville District is divided basically into two major linguistic groups: the Austronesian (Melanesian and Polynesian) on the island of Buka and in the northern portion of Bougainville, and the Non-Austronesian (Papuan or Non-Melanesian) in the southern portion. Rotokas is part of the Kunua-Keriaka-Rotokas-Eivo Stock of languages located between these two major groups. Because of its location it shares features of both, although it is elassified as Non-Austronesian.
Adam Muller, S.M. in his Grammar and Vocabulary of the Kunua Language suggests that this stock of language be called the "Central Languages" or "Papu-Melanesian mixed." (See Muller 1954:13.) He gives the following points of comparison between the three linguistic groups: a) the Central and Austronesian languages have one enumeration for everything, the Non-Austronesian languages have multiple enumeration which differs aecording to the classes of objects to be counted; b) the Austronesian and Non-Austronesian languages have some type of indication of the object within the verb affixation, the Central languages do not, and c) the Central languages include inclusive and exclusive pronounsl, the Austronesian include inclusive and exclusive pronouns and person markers within the verb affixation which differ according to this feature, and the Non-Austronesian have neither pronouns nor person markers within the verb affixation marked for inelusiveness or exelusiveness.
The Rotokas language is not only peculiar in that it does not fit neatly into either of the two major lingusitic groups of Bougainville District, but also in that the phonology includes but eleven segmental phonemes: /p, t, k, 8, r, Ag, a, e, i, o, and u/. The lack of nasal phonemes and the fluctuations between some obstruents and fricatives also violate linguistic universals.
To date there has been no linguistic materiale published on the Rotokas language.2 Most of the primary materials in this description are from a coneordance of 70 texts in Rotokas made on the IBM 1410 computer at the University of Oklahoma by the Linguistic Retrieval Project of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Oklahoma Research Institute sponsored by Grant GS-270 of the National Science Foundation. Research in Rotokas was carried out during 28 months of field work between 1965 and 1969 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. The immediate concern is for a description of the morphology. A future paper will deseribe the Rotokas syntax, and it is hoped that this paper, presenting both the form and the function of Rotokas words, will facilitate the formulation of the syntactic structure. The inclusion of the description of "functions" looks forward to the syntactic statement while completing the statement on morphology.
The paper is divided into two main sections, i.e., Form and Function. Both sections draw upon the texts for the initial observations. These observations are then added to and completed by additional information from the boncordance.
The purpose for including the texts is not only to illustrate the morphology, but also to demonstrate the validity..of certain morphological cuts and classifications.