ISO 639-3

English Wikipedia has an article on
ISO 639-3.

ISO 639-3 is a three-letter language code standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is widely used online for tagging and supporting content in multiple languages. After two rejected requests in 2008 and 2017, the identifier tok was adopted for Toki Pona on 20 January 2022.

Benefits

HTML and XML documents can mark Toki Pona text in a WCAG-compliant way with the attribute lang="tok". This metadata enables unambiguous language detection, which will ideally enable support for Toki Pona hyphenation and ligature rules, speech synthesis, and spelling and grammar checking. It also becomes easier for Toki Pona editions of more websites, apps, and other works to be created, some of which even require an ISO 639-3 code.

Support

The following services have Toki Pona support through the ISO 639-3 standard:

• Archive of Our Own includes Toki Pona as a language option.
• CLDR has a Toki Pona locale. A large amount of websites, apps, and translation projects rely on this standard.
• Linku has a Toki Pona localization.
• sona pona marks Toki Pona text with the templates {{tok}} and {{tp}}, which toggles italics.
• Wikidata has full Toki Pona support, including Toki Pona names and descriptions of data items and interface language.
• Wikipedia and Wiktionary mark Toki Pona text.
• YouTube supports Toki Pona closed captions.

History

This section needs work:

Citation formatting, final request

If you know about this topic, you can help us by editing it. (See all)

On 7 May 2007, Marcos Cramer (jan Moku) requested the language code tok, with additional supporters including Abel Johannes Kiefte (jan Mimoku), Helmut Voigt (jan Elumutu), and Marek Blahuš (jan Male). The request reported that there were "10-30 fluent speakers; several hundred with reasonable ability". On 18 February 2008, the request was rejected:

…the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority has determined that the request for this new code element is premature. The propagation of a new constructed language is often a short-lived interest of limited scope; few constructed languages have lasting impact in the world community of languages to become more than mere novelties. Toki Pona seems to fit the novelty category, as an intentionally "minimalist" language. During 2007 there was some media interest in Toki Pona, in which its novel aspects were highlighted. If Toki Pona survives the next few years and continues to develop, both in applications and in user base, then the RARegistration Authority will be open to consider a new request for assignment of a code element for Toki Pona.

A second request for an ISO 639-3 language code was submitted on 28 August 2017, and rejected on 23 January 2018.