Alphabets with the fewest letters
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Alphabets with the Fewest Letters — Daily trivia Sunday, June 14, 2026: questions and answers
All 10 questions with answers and explanations. Play this daily
Q 01Where is Rotokas, whose 12-letter alphabet is one of the world's shortest, spoken?
- AMongolia
- BGreenland
- CPapua New Guinea
- DIndonesia
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Papua New Guinea
Rotokas, spoken on Papua New Guinea's Bougainville Island, uses one of the world's shortest alphabets, just 12 letters (A, E, I, O, U, G, K, P, R, S, T, V), reflecting the language's phonetic simplicity.
Q 02George Bernard Shaw's will paid for a contest to design a new phonetic alphabet for which language?
- AEnglish
- BIrish
- CFrench
- DEsperanto
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English
Shaw thought writing English in the Latin alphabet wasted time, energy and paper; the winning Shavian alphabet was used to print his play Androcles and the Lion.
Q 03Which touch-reading system did a French teenager, blinded in a childhood accident, adapt from Charles Barbier's night writing?
- AMoon type
- BBraille
- CMorse code
- DSemaphore
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Braille
Louis Braille, hurt by an awl in his father's harness workshop at three and blind by five, first showed his raised-dot code to fellow students in 1824, at fifteen.
Q 04Why is the NATO phonetic code word for J spelled "Juliett", with two Ts?
- ASo French speakers do not read the final T as silent
- BTo avoid a clash with the code word for G
- CBecause ICAO reserves single-T words for numerals
- DTo keep every code word to exactly three syllables
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So French speakers do not read the final T as silent
Juliett carries two Ts so French speakers do not read the final T as silent, and Alfa is spelled with an f for speakers who may not know how 'ph' sounds.
Q 05Which East Asian writing system has no alphabet, using thousands of individual characters instead?
- AKorean Hangul
- BJapanese Kanji
- CThai script
- DVietnamese Quoc Ngu
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Japanese Kanji
Japanese kanji are characters adapted from Chinese that carry meaning rather than a single sound; the official jōyō list of 2,136 kanji covers what schoolchildren are expected to learn.
Q 06Hawaiian's alphabet has just 13 letters, with no R or S, so how is 'Merry Christmas' written in Hawaiian?
- AHauʻoli Makahiki Hou
- BMele Kalikimaka
- CAloha kakahiaka
- DMahalo nui loa
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Mele Kalikimaka
Mele Kalikimaka is 'Merry Christmas' sounded out in Hawaiian letters; the other options mean Happy New Year, good morning and thank you very much.
Q 07Which five letters does the 21-letter Italian alphabet leave out, using them only in loanwords?
- AJ, K, W, X, Y
- BC, K, Q, W, Y
- CH, J, K, W, Z
- DJ, Q, V, X, Z
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J, K, W, X, Y
Italian treats J, K, W, X, Y as foreign letters, keeping them mostly for loanwords such as weekend, foreign names and scientific terms like km.
Q 08What is the technical term for a script like traditional Hebrew that writes only consonants?
- ASyllabary
- BAbjad
- CAbugida
- DLogography
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Abjad
Hebrew is an abjad: short vowels are usually left unmarked, except in the Bible, poetry and books for children and learners, where dots and dashes supply them.
Q 09Which constructed language, created by Sonja Lang, gets by with roughly 120 words written in just 14 letters?
- AEsperanto
- BToki Pona
- CKlingon
- DVolapük
Show answer
Toki Pona
Toki Pona, 'the language of good', builds bigger ideas by combining its handful of basic words, and most of those words carry several meanings.
Q 10Which two of the modern Māori alphabet's 15 letters are character pairs counted as one?
- ANg and Wh
- BCh and Th
- CPh and Kh
- DNg and Rh
Show answer
Ng and Wh
Māori counts ng and wh as single letters among its 15, and in most dialects wh is now said like an English f.
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