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 02How many letters does the Shavian alphabet, funded by George Bernard Shaw's will, have?
- A24
- B40
- C52
- D48
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48
Shaw left money for a phonemic replacement for the Latin alphabet; Ronald Kingsley Read designed the winning system, with 48 letters including ligatures, each standing for a single English sound.
Q 03The Braille cell that encodes each letter uses how many raised dots, and in what arrangement?
- A4 in a square
- B5 in a cross
- C8 in a circle
- D6 in a rectangle
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6 in a rectangle
Braille uses 6 dots arranged in two columns of three dots each (a 2×3 rectangular cell) to create 64 possible combinations. This simple system allows blind individuals to read by touch and has been fundamental to literacy for the visually impaired since its invention in 1824.
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
Several NATO code words carry deliberately odd spellings so that speakers of other languages pronounce them as intended — "Alfa" and "Juliett" being the two best known.
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
Kanji are logographic characters adapted from Chinese, where each character carries meaning rather than a single sound. The official jōyō list of 2,136 characters is the set regarded as necessary for functional literacy.
Q 06In what year did missionaries cut the Hawaiian alphabet from eighteen letters to the set still used today?
- A1830
- B1841
- C1864
- D1826
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1826
The 1822 alphabet had five vowels and thirteen consonants. Redundant letters were eliminated four years later, leaving the twelve letters plus the ʻokina — which was not itself recognised as a letter until 1864.
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
They still sneak in through words like jeans, whisky and weekend, and a handful of native names such as Jesolo and Craxi that come from regional languages.
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
Scribes later invented vowel points called niqqud, dots and dashes hung around the letters, so modern Hebrew is classed as an 'impure' version of the type.
Q 09Roughly how many words did Sonja Lang's 2014 Toki Pona book present as the language's entire vocabulary?
- A850
- B400
- C120
- D1,500
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120
Lang designed it to simplify her own thinking; speakers lean on context and word combinations, so 'big water' has to do for a lake and a sea alike.
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
In most dialects 'wh' is pronounced like an English f, which is why Whangārei sounds like 'Fangarei' and the swearword-lookalike town of Whakatāne trips up tourists.
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