1058: Smallest Phoneme Inventory Nov 1, 2017

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The English alphabet has 26 letters, but has as many as 45 phonemes (sounds), depending on accent and somewhat upon the researcher. Plenty of languages have more, including !Xóõ (a.k.a. Taa) a click tongue which has over 120 phonemes and between 2 and 4 tones, but some have only around a dozen. Rokotas is considered to have the smallest phoneme inventory of any known language, with as few as 11 phonemes, though this does not mean necessarily that the words get especially long on average to theoretically compensate. Interestingly, the alphabet has 12 letters, similar to Hawai'ian, but the S and the T both represent /t/; S is only used before I and in the name for the language. The only other language that has been claimed to have fewer is debatably Pirahã.

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