Toki Pona

Toki Pona (; , , translated as 'the language of good') is a philosophical, artistic, constructed language designed for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition. It was created by Canadian linguist and hyperpolyglot Sonja Lang to simplify 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'' (referred to as in Toki Pona). Lang also released a supplementary dictionary, the ''Toki Pona Dictionary'' (referred to as ), 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: , derived from Tok Pisin , which itself comes from English ''talk''; and , from Esperanto , from Latin . The name therefore means 'good language', 'the language of good' and 'simple language', emphasizing that the language encourages speakers to find joy in simplicity.

Purpose

One of the language's main goals is a focus on minimalism. It is designed to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are near-universal among cultures. It has a minimal vocabulary and 14 phonemes devised to be easy to pronounce for speakers of various language backgrounds.

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.

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.

Another aim of the language is 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, it is meant to be "fun and cute".

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 linguist and translator Sonja Lang (formerly Sonja Elen Kisa). 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. 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, 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.

In 2015, YouTuber jan Misali uploaded a series titled ''12 Days of '', which proved influential and was recommended as a learning tool by Sitelen Sitelen creator Jonathan Gabel.

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 Discord server over a few months. The book presents the original 120 words plus 16 () as gathered from at least over 40% of respondents. It also contains 45 words given by 40% or less of respondents, referred to as (), sometimes also called .

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 (Toki Pona edition)'', the first in a planned series of illustrated storybooks written in Sitelen Pona (referred to collectively as ).

Phonology and phonotactics

Phonemic inventory

Toki Pona has nine consonants () and five vowels (), shown here with the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. 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 (except those starting with the nasal coda), or tones. Both its sound inventory and phonotactics are compatible with the majority of human languages, and are therefore readily accessible.

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 in a 10kB sample of texts 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 (not counting final n), 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 (C)V(N), 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% (counting each word once).

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, England or English become and John becomes .

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 Latin letters—''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'' (as in many Germanic and Slavic languages) 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

The Sitelen Pona () writing system was devised as an alternative writing system by Lang herself, and first published in her book ''Toki Pona: The Language of Good'' in 2014. In it 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 (), originally known as (), is a writing system created by Jonathan Gabel. This more elaborate non-linear system uses two separate methods to form words: logograms representing words and an alphasyllabary for writing the syllables (especially for proper names). 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 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 introduces predicates, and the particle 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 well defined parts of speech; they may be used as nouns, verbs, modifiers, or interjections. A content word's position in a sentence determines its role, allowing the limited number of words to serve many purposes. Thus, the word means "to eat" in the verb position, but means "food" (that which is eaten) in the noun position, and might mean "edible" (of or relating to eating) as an adjective.

Toki Pona has more complicated sentence structures as well. Prepositional phrases follow the objects. The particle 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 , , , , , , , , etc. can stand alone as a sentence.

Statements follow the normal structure of ''subject-predicate'' with an optional phrase at the beginning. The word precedes the predicate unless the subject is or . The marker comes before direct objects. More and markers can present more predicates and direct objects respectively. Vocative phrases come before the main sentence and are marked with at the end of the phrase, after the addressee.

In commands, the word comes before a verb to express a second-person command. It can also replace , or come after the subjects or , 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 verb", in which comes in between a duplicated verb, auxiliary verb, or other predicates. Another way is to put the question tag () 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 .

Pronouns

Toki Pona has four basic pronouns: (first person), (second person), (third person), and (demonstrative). Number and gender are not specified by default, but they 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 (''person'') with (''fight'') to make (''fighter, soldier, warrior'').

Nouns do not decline according to number. can mean ''person, people, humanity, somebody'' depending on context.

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. () or ().

Modifiers

Phrases in Toki Pona are head-initial; modifiers always come after the word that they modify. Therefore, (), can be a ''fighting animal'', whereas (), can mean ''animal war''.

When a second modifier is added to a phrase, for example , it modifies all that comes before it, so might mean ''many good people'', with both (''good'') and (''many'') modifying (''person''). The particle is placed before two or more modifiers to group them into another phrase that functions as a unit to modify the head: In , as a unit means ''much goodness'', to together mean ''very good person''. modifies , and as a whole modifies .

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.

Vocabulary

Toki Pona has around 120 to 137 words. Each is polysemous, and covers a range of similar concepts, so 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, can mean ''friend'', although it translates to ''good person'', and (), could be understood to mean ''alcohol'' or ''alcoholic beverage'' depending on the context. The verb ''to teach'' can be expressed by (). 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: (black), (white), (red), (yellow), and ( blue and green). 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 and . The phrase means "a reddish shade of blue" and means "a bluish shade of red".

Numbers

Toki Pona has words for one (), two (), and many (). In addition, can mean ''zero'' (its main meaning being ''no, none''), and () 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 which means ''many''.

A more complex system expresses larger numbers additively by using phrases such as for three, for four, and so on. This feature purposely makes it impractical to communicate large numbers. This system, described in Lang's book, also uses () to signify five, () to signify twenty, and () to signify hundred. For example, using this structure would mean 102 and would signify 78.

Words history

Some words have obsolete synonyms. For example, replaced (protuberance) early in the language's development for unknown reasons. Later, the pronoun replaced (''he, she, it, they''), which was sometimes confused with (''bad''). Similarly, was added as an alternative to (''all'') to avoid confusion with (''no, not'') among people who reduce unstressed vowels, though both forms are still used.

Originally, meant ''eye'' and was used as a verb ''to see''. In ''Toki Pona: The Language of Good'', the meanings were merged into , being the alternative.

Words that were simply removed from the lexicon include (''block, stairs''), (''monster, fear''), (''old''), (''cut''), and (''sibling''). These words were considered outdated because they were not included in the official book. However, , , , and retained enough usage in the community that they were re-included in the lexicon as in ''Toki Pona Dictionary''.

Besides and , which replaced existing words, a few words were added to the original 118: (''grain, bread, pasta, rice''), (''market, shop, trade''), (''hunt, gather''), and (''extra, additional, spice''), another word for (''new, fresh'').

Provenance

Most Toki Pona words come from English, Tok Pisin, Finnish, Georgian, Dutch, Acadian French, Esperanto, and Serbo-Croatian, with a few from Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese).

Many of these derivations are transparent. For example, (''speech, language'') is similar to Tok Pisin and its English source ''talk'', while (''good, positive''), from Esperanto , reflects generic Romance , , 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 (''sleep, rest''), for example, comes from Dutch and is cognate with English ''sleep''; (any animal from the superfamily Musteloidea) from Finnish ; (''use'') is somewhat distorted from Dutch , and from (''lizard'') is scarcely recognizable. (Because ''*ti'' is an illegal syllable in Toki Pona, Dutch ''di'' becomes ''si.'')

Although only 14 words (12%) 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 (an English borrowing) and Akan, four phonesthetic words (two which are found in English, one from Japanese, and one which was made up); and one other made-up word (the grammatical particle ).

Signed Toki Pona and

Signed Toki Pona, or , 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 also exists, and is more widely used in the Toki Pona community than . It is a separate language with its own grammar, but has a vocabulary that generally parallels Toki Pona. 's signs have increased iconicity as compared to , 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 instead of .

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. For a short time there was a Wikipedia written in Toki Pona (called ). It was closed in 2005 and moved to Wikia/Fandom, and then moved from Fandom to an independent website on 23 April 2021.

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 Vienna, Maastricht, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

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 and . 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 (), and it is officially registered as a zine in the United Kingdom.

Sample texts

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

(excerpt)

The opening lines of by , a 2022 Toki Pona translation of the novel Siddhartha (novel), Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, follow below. The text uses interpuncts as markers for end of the sentence.

Back-translation in English:

See also

* Alphabet of human thought
* Army Slavic

Notes

References

Primary sources

Publications

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External links

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Official Toki Pona dictionary
from ''The Language of Good''


a wiki-based encyclopedia written in Toki Pona


a wiki about Toki Pona


a zine in Toki Pona

{{Authority control

Toki Pona,
2001 introductions
Analytic languages
Artistic languages
Constructed languages
Constructed languages introduced in the 2000s
Engineered languages
Isolating languages
Logographic writing systems
Minimalism
Taoism in popular culture