Sitelen Pona
Sitelen Pona is a constructed logography used for Toki Pona. It was originally designed circa 2013 and published in 2014 by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang, the language's creator.
History
Sitelen Pona was designed by Lang in preparation for her upcoming Toki Pona textbook release. In 2013, she published a page listing 20 characters as a sample of the book's contents. The book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, was published in 2014, and it included the first full description of Sitelen Pona in a dedicated section.In 2021, Lang declared Sitelen Pona public domain.
In 2024, Lang published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the first in the su series of illustrated storybooks aimed at beginners, in which all Toki Pona text is written in sitelen pona. This was the first published book that used sitelen pona as a primary script.
In 2025, around twenty members, including Lang, founded the Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association to represent the interests of publishers and fontmakers who use the script. The association also collaborated with other groups, including the Unicode Consortium, for the script's technical standardization.
In 2026, the Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association released the Common Sitelen Pona standard, which defines a set of common-use characters and various methods of encoding them for fonts.
Overview
Sitelen Pona is typically written left-to-right, top-to-bottom. As a logography, each word is written with a single grapheme. Many of the characters are derived from translingual and universal symbols such as pictograms, road signs, mathematical symbols, and emoticons. They have been described as "mostly easy to recognize, quick to remember and simple enough that even a child could draw them."A head followed by a single modifier may be combined into one character by stacking the modifier grapheme above the head grapheme, or by nesting the modifier grapheme inside the head grapheme if there is space. The symbol of the language is written this way, with the grapheme nested inside the grapheme .
Names
Names are written by enclosing multiple characters in a cartouche shaped like a rounded rectangle. Each character inside represents the first phoneme of its word. The specific characters used in a name may be chosen creatively to convey meaning about its subject.In an alternative system called nasin sitelen kalama, characters inside a cartouche can be followed by interpuncts or dots, where each interpunct represents the next mora of the word, and a colon represents all morae of the word.
Punctuation
Sitelen Pona punctuation is unstandardized and thus highly variable, as The Language of Good features only the cartouche. As a result, some texts use no punctuation at all, instead relying on formatting and context.Sentence boundaries are typically marked with an interpunct, period, line break, or a wide space. Question marks and exclamation marks are often proscribed due to their similarity to the characters for the words seme and o respectively.
Where quotation marks are used, CJK-style corner brackets and double high quotation marks are most common.
Characters
The original English edition of Lang's book Toki Pona: The Language of Good introduces 120 Logographic characters, one for each of the core words taught in the book.The 2022 Esperanto edition of the same book includes alternative ways to write three words.
The same edition presents characters for the 17 additional words spotlighted as "essential" in Toki Pona Dictionary. According to the accompanying text, these were the most commonly used characters for those words as of 2022, but there were still disagreements in the speaking community, and the following characters might be subject to change based on future community consensus.
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