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 .

Sitelen Sitelen

Sitelen Sitelen, alternatively known as sitelen suwi, is a mixed writing system for Toki Pona created by Jonathan Gabel. This more elaborate non-linear system combines a logographic script with an abugida for writing syllables. The complex artful designs of the glyphs are chosen to help people who use this writing system to slow down and explore how not only the language but also the method of communication can influence their thinking.
Sitelen Sitelen's overall aesthetics are inspired by West Coast of [the United States|US west-coast] comix artists such as Jim Woodring and US east-coast graffiti artists such as Kenny Scharf. The designs of many individual characters are inspired by characters and principles from various other writing systems, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, Chinese characters, Maya script, Mi'kmaw hieroglyphs, Dongba symbols, as well as early Pagan and Christian signs and symbols.

Grammar

Toki Pona's word order is subject–verb–object. The particle li introduces the predicate, and the particle e introduces direct objects. Toki Pona is head-initial: a noun or verb is followed by its modifiers.
Some words are grammatical particles, while the others are content words with lexical meanings. The content words do not fall into most traditional parts of speech; they may be used as nouns, verbs, modifiers, or interjections. A content word's position in a sentence and phrase determines its role, allowing the limited number of words to serve many purposes. Thus, the word moku means "to eat" in the verb position following li, but means "food" in a noun position, and might mean "edible" as an adjective.
Toki Pona has more complicated sentence structures as well. There are closed classes of content words that can act as preverbs and prepositions in specific parts of a sentence. Preverbs are catenative and are inserted between li and the main verb. Prepositional phrases follow the objects. The particle la ends a phrase or clause that comes before the subject to add additional context.

Sentence structures

A sentence may be an interjection, statement, wish/command, or question.
For example, interjections such as a, ala, ike, jaki, mu, pakala, pona, toki, etc. can stand alone as a sentence.
Full sentences all follow the subject–predicate order with an optional la phrase at the beginning. In statements, the word li precedes the predicate unless the subject is mi or sina. The marker e comes before direct objects. More li and e markers can present more predicates and direct objects respectively. Vocative phrases come before the main sentence and are marked with o at the end of the phrase, after the addressee.
In commands, sina as a second-person subject may be dropped, and the word o comes before the verb. This allows commands to treat a vocative phrase as the subject. The word o can also replace li, or come after the subjects mi or sina, to express wishes.
There are two ways to form yes–no questions in Toki Pona. One method is to use the A-not-A construction, "verb ala verb", in which ala comes in between a duplicated verb, auxiliary verb, or other predicates. Another way is to put the question tag anu seme? after the phrase being inquired about. Just putting a question mark at the end of a sentence does not form a question grammatically.
Non-polar questions are formed by replacing the unknown information with the interrogative word seme.

Pronouns

Toki Pona has four basic pronouns: mi, sina, ona, and ni. As with content words in general, number and gender are not obligatorily marked, but can be specified with additional modifiers to the pronouns.

Nouns

With such a small vocabulary, Toki Pona relies heavily on noun phrases, where a noun is modified by a following word, to make more complex meanings. A typical example is combining jan with utala to make jan utala.
Nouns do not decline according to number; jan can mean person, people, humanity, somebody depending on context. Adding wan, tu, or mute as needed specifies singular, dual, or plural, respectively.
Toki Pona does not use isolated proper nouns; instead, they must modify a preceding noun. For this reason, they may be called "proper adjectives" or simply "proper words" instead of "proper nouns". For example, names of people and places are used as modifiers of the common word for "person" and "place", e.g. ma Kanata or jan Lisa.

Modifiers

s in Toki Pona are head-initial; modifiers always come after the word that they modify. Therefore, soweli utala, can be a fighting animal, whereas utala soweli, can mean animal war.
When a second modifier is added to a phrase, for example jan pona mute, it modifies all that comes before it, so jan pona mute might mean many good people, with both pona and mute modifying jan. The particle pi is placed before two or more modifiers to group them into another phrase that functions as a unit to modify the head: In jan pi pona mute, pona mute as a unit means much goodness, to together mean very good person. mute modifies pona, and pona mute as a whole modifies jan.
Demonstratives, numerals, and possessive pronouns come after the head like other modifiers.

Verbs

Toki Pona does not inflect verbs according to person, tense, mood, or voice, as the language features no inflection whatsoever. Person is indicated by the subject of the verb; time is indicated through context or by a temporal adverb in the sentence.
Prepositions can be used in the predicate in place of a regular verb. This expresses the verb and preposition senses in one. For example, tawa means "to go toward" in this case.

Vocabulary

Toki Pona has around 120 to 137 words. Each is polysemous, and covers a range of similar concepts, so suli not only means big or long, but also important. Their use relies heavily on context. To express more complex thoughts, the words can be combined. For example, jan pona can mean friend, although it translates to good person, and telo nasa, could be understood to mean alcohol or alcoholic beverage depending on the context. The verb to teach can be expressed by pana e sona. Essentially identical concepts can be described by different words as the choice relies on the speaker's perception and experience.

Colors

Toki Pona has five words for colors: pimeja, walo, loje, jelo, and laso. Although the simplified conceptualization of colors tends to exclude a number of colors that are commonly expressed in Western languages, speakers sometimes may combine these five words to make more specific descriptions of certain colors. For instance, "purple" may be represented by combining laso and loje. The phrase laso loje means "a reddish shade of blue" and loje laso means "a bluish shade of red".

Numbers

Toki Pona has words for one, two, and many. In addition, ala can mean zero, and ale can express an infinite or immense amount.
The simplest number system uses these five words to express any amount necessary. For numbers larger than two, speakers would use mute which means many.
A more complex system expresses larger numbers additively by using phrases such as tu wan for three, tu tu for four, and so on. This feature purposely makes it impractical to communicate large numbers. This system, described in Lang's book, also uses luka to signify five, mute to signify twenty, and ale to signify hundred. For example, using this structure ale tu would mean 102 and mute mute mute luka luka luka tu wan would signify 78.

Vocabulary history

Some words have obsolete synonyms. For example, nena replaced kapa early in the language's development for unknown reasons. Later, the pronoun ona replaced iki, which was sometimes confused with ike. Similarly, ali was added as an alternative to ale to avoid confusion with ala among people who reduce unstressed vowels, though both forms are still used.
Originally, oko meant eye and lukin was used as a verb to see. In Toki Pona: The Language of Good, the meanings were merged into lukin, oko being the alternative.
Words that were simply removed from the lexicon include leko, monsuta, majuna, kipisi, and pata. These words were considered outdated because they were not included in the official book. However, oko, leko, monsuta, and kipisi retained enough usage in the community that they were re-included in the lexicon as nimi ku suli in Toki Pona Dictionary.
Besides nena and ona, which replaced existing words, a few words were added to the original 118: pan, esun, alasa, and namako, another word for sin.

Provenance

Most Toki Pona words come from English, Tok Pisin, Finnish, Georgian, Dutch, Acadian French, Esperanto, and Serbo-Croatian, with a few from Chinese.
Many of these derivations are transparent. For example, toki is similar to Tok Pisin tok and its English source talk, while pona, from Esperanto bona, reflects generic Romance bon, buona, English bonus, etc. However, the changes in pronunciation required by the simple phonetic system often make the origins of other words more difficult to see. The word lape, for example, comes from Dutch slapen and is cognate with English sleep; kijetesantakalu from Finnish kierteishäntäkarhu; kepeken is somewhat distorted from Dutch gebruiken, and akesi from hagedis is scarcely recognizable.
Although only 14 words are listed as derived from English, a large number of the Tok Pisin, Esperanto, and other words are transparently cognate with English, raising the English-friendly portion of the vocabulary to about 30%. The portions of the lexicon from other languages are 15% Tok Pisin, 14% Finnish, 14% Esperanto, 12% Serbo-Croatian, 10% Acadian French, 9% Dutch, 8% Georgian, 5% Mandarin, 3% Cantonese; one word each from Welsh, Tongan and Akan, four phonesthetic words ; and one other made-up word.

Signed Toki Pona and

Signed Toki Pona, or toki pona luka, is a manually coded form of Toki Pona. Each word and letter has its own sign, which is distinguished by the handshape, location of the hand on the body, palm or finger orientation, and the usage of one or both hands. Most signs are performed with the right hand at the required location. A few signs, however, are performed with both hands in a symmetrical way. To form a sentence, each of the signs is performed using the grammar and word order of Toki Pona.
A more naturalistic constructed sign language called luka pona also exists, and is more widely used in the Toki Pona community than toki pona luka. It is a separate language with its own grammar, but has a vocabulary that generally parallels Toki Pona. luka pona's signs have increased iconicity as compared to toki pona luka, and many signs are loan-words from natural sign languages. Its grammar is subject-object-verb, and, like natural sign languages, it makes use of classifier constructions and signing space. In Toki Pona Dictionary, Sonja Lang recommends learning luka pona instead of toki pona luka.

Community

The language is fairly well known among Esperantists, who often offer courses and conversation groups at their meetups. In 2007, Lang said that at least 100 people speak Toki Pona fluently and estimated that a few hundred have a basic knowledge of the language. One-hour courses of Toki Pona were taught on various occasions by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during their Independent Activities Period.
The language is used mainly online on social media, in forums, and other online groups. Users of the language are spread out across multiple platforms. A Yahoo! group existed from about 2002 to 2009, when it moved to a forum on a phpBB site.
The largest groups exist on Facebook, Discord, and Reddit. Two large groups exist on Facebook: one designated for conversation in Toki Pona and English, and the other for conversation in only Toki Pona. The former of the two is the more popular.
Memrise has user-created materials for learning Toki Pona.
In-person meetups have been organized by the community, including in Sarajevo, Vienna, Maastricht, Berlin, Seattle, and Amsterdam.

Toki Pona Wikipedia

For a short time there was a Wikipedia written in Toki Pona. It was closed in 2005 and moved to Wikia/Fandom, and then moved from Fandom to an independent website on 23 April 2021. it returned to being a subdomain of wikipedia.org.

Literature

There are a few published books and many other works in Toki Pona. Most of the published works are language-learning books for beginners like akesi seli lili and meli olin moli. Many other works are translations of original literature in other languages.
Starting in 2020, a group has been working on and publishing a zine in Toki Pona called lipu tenpo, and it is officially registered as a zine in the United Kingdom.

Sample texts

An original poem about time by jan Jasun, which won first place in a 2023 poetry contest.

(excerpt)

The opening lines of jan Sitata by, a 2022 Toki Pona translation of the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, follow below. The text uses interpuncts as markers for end of the sentence.
Back-translation in English: