Sandhi

The subject of this article is nonstandard and will not be understood by most speakers.

If you are a learner, this information will not help you speak the language. It is recommended to familiarize yourself with the standard style, and to be informed and selective about which nonstandard styles you adopt.

Sandhi is any of various types of sound changes that occur at a word boundary. While Toki Pona generally has no such features, speakers have experimented with sandhis for stylistic and artistic effect, and learners may involve them in their pronunciation unconsciously. They tend to be used to avoid hiatus, two adjacent vowels.

Glottal stop

Vowels in hiatus may be split with a glottal stop, catching all airflow at the very back of the throat. This is the sound at the beginning and hyphen of English "uh-oh" [ˈʔʌ.ʔow].

A Toki Pona example is tawa a [ˈtawa‿ʔa]. A glottal stop separates the adjacent /a/ phonemes, which might otherwise only sound like tawa with the end extended [ˈtawaː].

Glide

Some speakers insert a semivowel glide at the end of vowels. In English, this occurs with the "long vowels" ay ee oh oo /ej ij ow uw/ that are closest to Toki Pona e i o u.

Learners may do this unintentionally, leading to ambiguities between phrases like mi jo pona e ni ("I'm holding this fine") and mi o pona e ni [mij‿o ˈpona e ni] ("I should fix that"). Practice keeping the vowels "flat" to avoid this.

Some proficient speakers add glides intentionally in certain contexts, to split the hiatus in phrases like wile e [ˈwilej‿e]. There is very little risk of confusion with je, an obscure nimi sin, and the syllables *ji *wo *wu are disallowed, so [σj‿i σw‿o σw‿u] will be understood as /σ.i σ.o σ.u/ instead.

Crasis

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Crasis is merging adjacent vowels into a new vowel or diphthong.

A resulting diphthong may be a semivowel glide, as in pona e ni [ˈpona‿j ni] creating the glide of English "eye". This can be done in music to reduce the syllables in a lyric, such as toki e [ˈtokj‿e] going from 3 to 2 syllables (to‧kje or tok‧je).