Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a philosophical and artistic constructed language designed for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition. It was created by Canadian translator and polyglot Sonja Lang with the stated purpose of simplifying her thoughts and communication. The first drafts were published online in 2001, while the complete form was published in the 2014 book Toki Pona: The Language of Good. Lang also released a supplementary dictionary, the Toki Pona Dictionary, in July 2021, describing the language as used by its community of speakers. In 2024, a third book was released, a Toki Pona adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in Sitelen Pona.
Toki Pona is an isolating language with only 14 phonemes and an underlying feature of minimalism. It focuses on simple, near-universal concepts to maximize expression from very few words. In Toki Pona: The Language of Good, Lang presents around 120 words, while the later Toki Pona Dictionary lists 137 "essential" words and a small number of less-used ones. Its words are easy to pronounce across language backgrounds, which allows it to serve as a bridge of sorts for people of different cultures. However, it was not created as an international auxiliary language. Partly inspired by Taoist philosophy, the language is designed to help users concentrate on basic things and to promote positive thinking, in accordance with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Despite the small vocabulary, speakers can understand and communicate, mainly relying on context, combinations of words, and expository sentences to express more specific meanings.
After its initial creation, a small community of speakers developed in the early 2000s. While activity mainly takes place online in chat rooms, on social media, and in other online groups, there have been a few organized in-person meetups.

Etymology

The name of the language has two parts: toki, derived from Tok Pisin tok, which itself comes from English talk; and pona, from Esperanto bona, from Latin bonus. The name toki pona therefore means 'good language', 'the language of good' and 'simple language', emphasizing that the language encourages speakers to find joy in simplicity.

Purpose

Toki Pona was designed both as a personal artistic language and a philosophical language focused on minimalism. It is designed to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. Inspired by pidgins, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are common among cultures. Its minimal vocabulary and 14 phonemes are devised to be easy to pronounce for speakers of various language backgrounds.
Partly inspired by Taoist philosophy, another goal of Toki Pona is to help its speakers focus on the essentials by reducing complex concepts to basic elements. From these simple notions, more complex ideas can be built up by simple combining. This allows the users to see the fundamental nature and effect of the ideas expressed. It was designed for the speakers to become aware of the present moment and pay more attention to the surroundings and the words people use. According to its author, Toki Pona is meant to be "fun and cute".
On the basis of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states that a language influences the way its speakers think and behave, Toki Pona was designed to induce positive thinking.
Although it was not intended as an international auxiliary language, a worldwide online community uses it for communication.

History

Toki Pona was developed by the Canadian polyglot and translator Sonja Lang. Born in 1978 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Lang grew up in a bilingual family; her mother spoke French, and her father spoke English. During and after her high school years, she became fluent in five languages, including Esperanto. Esperanto was the inspiration for her creation of constructed languages.
In 2001, Lang was experiencing depression and started working on Toki Pona as a way to simplify her thoughts. In the same year, an early version of the language was published online, and it quickly gained popularity. An early community formed in a Yahoo group created by Lang. She was inspired by hunter-gatherers, saying in an interview with The Atlantic: "I thought, what would it have been like to just be a person in nature, interacting with things in a primitive way?"
In 2014, Lang released her first book on the language, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, which features 120 main words, plus 3 words presented as synonyms of these, though generally in use with different meanings, and provides a completed form of the language based on how Lang used the language at the time. In 2016, the book was also published in French, and versions in German, Esperanto, and Persian have since been completed.

In 2021, Lang released her second book, Toki Pona Dictionary, a comprehensive two-way Toki Pona–English dictionary including more than 11,000 entries detailing the use of the language as she gathered from polls conducted in the ma pona pi toki pona Discord server over a few months. The book presents the original 120 words plus 16 nimi ku suli as gathered from at least over 40% of respondents. It also contains 45 words given by 40% or less of respondents, referred to as nimi ku pi suli ala, sometimes also called nimi ku lili.

After two failed applications for an ISO 639-3 code, a third request was filed in August 2021, which resulted in the ISO 639-3 code being adopted in January 2022.
Toki Pona was the subject of some scientific works, and it has also been used for artificial intelligence and software tools, as well as a therapeutic method for eliminating negative thinking by having patients keep track of their thoughts in the language. In 2010, it was chosen for the first version of the vocabulary for the ROILA project. The purpose of the study was to investigate the use of an artificial language on the accuracy of machine speech recognition, and it was revealed that the modified vocabulary of Toki Pona significantly outperformed English.
In February of 2024, Lang released the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the first in a planned series of illustrated storybooks written in Sitelen Pona.

Phonology

Phonemic inventory

Toki Pona has nine consonants and five vowels. Stress falls on the initial syllable of a word, and it is marked by an increase in loudness, length, or pitch. There are no diphthongs, vowel hiatus, contrasting vowel length, consonant clusters, or tones. Both its sound inventory and phonotactics are compatible with the majority of human languages, and are therefore readily accessible.

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal
Nasal
Stop
Fricative
Approximant

Distribution

The statistical vowel spread is fairly typical when compared with other languages. Counting each word once, 32% of vowels are, 25% are, with and a bit over 15% each, and 10% are. The usage frequency from the official Toki Pona mailing list and websites of fluent speakers was slightly more skewed: 34%, 30%, 15% each and, and 6%.
Of the syllable-initial consonants, is the most common, at 20% total; are over 10%, then the nasals , with the least common, at little more than 5% each, being. The high frequency of and low frequency of is somewhat unusual among the world's languages.

Phonotactics

The first syllable of a word follows the form V, i.e. an optional consonant, a vowel, and an optional final nasal. Subsequent syllables follow the same form, except that the leading consonant is required. Syllables can thus be CV, CVN, V, or VN. As in most languages, CV is the most common syllable type, at 75%.
The following sequences are not allowed: *, nor may a syllable's final nasal occur before or in the same word.
Proper nouns are usually converted into Toki Pona proper adjectives using a set of guidelines. The native, or even colloquial, pronunciation is used as the basis for the subsequent sound conversion. Thus, English becomes Inli and John becomes San.

Allophony

Because of its small phoneme inventory, Toki Pona allows for extensive allophonic variation. For example, may be pronounced as well as, as or as well as, as as well as, and vowels may be either long or short.
Furthermore, while written as n, the nasal at the end of a syllable can be pronounced as any nasal stop, and it is normally assimilated to the following consonant.

Writing systems

Fourteen letters of the Latin alphabet—a, e, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, s, t, u, w—are used to write the language. They have the same values as in the International Phonetic Alphabet: j sounds like English y and the vowels are like those of Spanish, Modern Greek, or Modern Hebrew. Capital initials are used to mark proper names, while common words are always written with lowercase letters, even when they start a sentence.
Besides the Latin alphabet, which is the most common way of writing the language, many alternative writing systems have been developed for and adapted to Toki Pona. Most successful and widespread are two logographic writing systems, Sitelen Pona and Sitelen Sitelen. Both were included in the book Toki Pona: The Language of Good.

Sitelen Pona

Sitelen Pona is a logographic writing system devised by Lang as an alternative writing system for Toki Pona, and first published in her book Toki Pona: The Language of Good in 2014. As a logography, each word is represented by its own symbol. It has been described as "a hieroglyphic-like script that makes use of squiggles and other childlike shapes".
Symbols representing a single adjective may be written inside or above the symbol for the preceding word that they modify. The symbol of the language is written in Sitelen Pona, with the symbol written inside the symbol .