Toki Pona

The Toki Pona logo. It is retrofitted into sitelen pona as the combined glyph toki-ponatoki-pona.

Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001. It is designed for talking about things by explaining them in simple terms.

Toki Pona has a community of over 1800 speakers and is mainly spoken online, where it is one of the most popular conlangs. Speakers and proponents of Toki Pona are mainly called tokiponists.

Many creative works have been made in Toki Pona or translated into it.

Name

toki pona (all lowercase) is the language's most commonly used endonym. Notably, it is not a proper name; the phrase literally means "good speech" and can describe any good communication. Some speakers use other phrases to refer to the language, such as toki ni ("this language").

Toki Pona (titlecased) is the language's proper name in other languages such as English, French, and German. It is usually translated as "the language of good" (Esperanto: la lingvo de bono, French: la langue du bien, German: die Sprache des Guten). In Esperanto, the name is altered to Tokipono.

Language rules

1. Phonology: Letters are pronounced as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Stress is on the start of each word.
   Most of the consonants are intuitive to English speakers. j is an i with a swash tail, pronounced like English Y as in "fjord" and "hallelujah". Vowels are pronounced as in languages like Spanish, Japanese, and Esperanto.
   There are well-defined phonotactics, but that only matters for transliterating names.

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2. Modifiers (adjectives or adverbs) come after their heads (nouns or verbs).
   In toki pona, toki ("language") is the head, and pona ("good") is the modifier. sike loje mi is literally "ball red my", and means "my red ball". This is typically the opposite of English, but there are counterexamples like "someone special", "anything new", "time immemorial", and "Alcoholics Anonymous".
3. Proper names are modifiers and require a descriptive head.
   Sonja Lang becomes jan Sonja, "the person Sonja". Canada becomes ma Kanata, "the place Canada".
4. Phrasal modifiers start with pi, which groups the rest of the phrase.
   tomo telo nasa means "strange water room", perhaps "weird washroom"; tomo is modified by telo and nasa. tomo pi telo nasa means "strange-water room", perhaps "pub", because alcohol is a liquid that makes people strange; tomo is modified by telo nasa, wherein telo is modified by nasa.
   This grammatical construction is sometimes avoided.
5. Multiple subjects are separated with en.

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6. Predicates come after all subjects. li starts each predicate, with two exceptions: If the subject is only mi ("I", "we") or only sina ("you"), li is dropped.
   The main word of the predicate can be analyzed as a verb. By this analysis, Toki Pona has dynamic and stative verbs. In the sentence mi moku, the word moku can be dynamic, "to eat", or stative, "to be food" (less likely in this case).
7. Yes-or-no questions are formed with "verb ala verb", or with anu seme at the end. The main way to answer "yes" is to repeat the verb.
   Open-ended questions are formed with seme.
8. Commands use o in place of li. If the subject is only sina, that subject can be dropped.
9. Preverbs (auxiliary verbs) come before their main verb.
   Only certain words have preverb definitions, mainly awen ("to continue"), kama ("to come", as in kama sona, "to come to know", "to learn", or kama jo, "to come to have", "to get"), ken ("to be able"), lukin / alasa ("to try"), sona ("to know how"), and wile ("to need / want").

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10. Direct objects come after their respective verb. e starts each direct object.
    A basic sentence is ona li sona e toki pona. ona ("they") is the subject, sona ("to know") is the verb marked by li, and toki pona is the direct object marked by e.
11. Prepositional phrases use no special particle.
    kepeken, lon, sama, tawa, and tan have preposition definitions. e can still change a preposition to a transitive verb. mi tawa ma means "I go to the land"; mi tawa e ma means "I move the land", or "mi makes the ma into ma tawa".

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12. Context phrases come before the main sentence. la ends each context phrase.

Benefits and applications

Main article: Benefits and applications

Toki Pona has many alleged benefits and applications across fields such as therapy, communication science, computer science, language learning, and teaching. These are often cited as reasons to learn the language.

History

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Main article: History

Sonja Lang started developing Toki Pona to simplify her thoughts during periods of depression. It was also partly inspired by Taoist philosophy. She shared early versions of the language online starting in August 2001, and got feedback on words and features. The project initially gained popularity with Esperantists. Much of the early activity was on Yahoo! Groups, from March 2002 onwards, and a dedicated phpBB forum.

tenpo pu

Sonja Lang published the first official Toki Pona book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good (lipu pu), in May 2014. It marked the end of her development of the language, and presented her own way of using it. The book presents Toki Pona's philosophy and is mostly dedicated to lessons, with texts and dictionaries afterward. It includes 120 main words, with 3 more presented as "synonyms". It also features two writing systems created for the language: sitelen pona and sitelen sitelen.

Toki Pona continued to grow in popularity in the following years, in part with the spread of reviews and video lessons such as jan Misali's 2015 series, 12 Days of sona pi toki pona. It also started to attract scientific research judging the language's performance in various applications, both therapeutic and unrelated to its original purposes.

A French translation of lipu pu, titled Toki Pona: la langue du bien, was published in April 2016.

The first Toki Pona census was released in April 2021.

sitelen pona was proposed for the UCSUR in August 2021, providing a standard for its encoding in fonts, and thus as plain text.

Later in 2021, the Linku dictionary project was started.

tenpo ku

In July 2021, Sonja Lang compiled the descriptive Toki Pona Dictionary (lipu ku), providing corrections and clarifications of lipu pu and passing the torch of the language's evolution onto the community.

A yearly celebration of Toki Pona's anniversary, suno pi toki pona, began on August 2021.

In December 2021, lipu pu was translated to German as Toki Pona: Die Sprache des Guten with bonus material from lipu ku.

After rejected requests in 2008 and 2018, the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority adopted the identifier tok for Toki Pona on January 20, 2022. The webpage was updated on the 28th.

lipu pu was translated into Esperanto as Tokipono: La lingvo de bono, published in October 2022. The edition includes notes and words featured in lipu ku, and additional Toki Pona texts.

Usage

Main article: Usage

Toki Pona has been the subject or source language of various pieces of academia, art, media, and software.

Community

Main article: Communities

The official Toki Pona website links to several communities, as well as a page designed to help with the ISO language code application:

• Discord:
  • ma pona pi toki pona
  • ma toki pona (Toki Pona only)
  • kama sona (for beginners)
• Telegram: toki pona – jan li wile pona taso
• Mastodon: toki.social
• Facebook: toki pona
• Where is Toki Pona used?

References

English Wikipedia has an article on
Toki Pona.