Esperanta versio

Toki Pona: a Small World Language

Overview

Although Toki Pona was not initially intended as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL), it has effectively grown into a small world language, occupying a niche that is similar yet distinct from Esperanto. Conversely, while Esperanto was proposed to become an IAL and comes with this attached ideology, it clearly never achieved that ambition. However, Esperanto also thrives if viewed as a small world language like Toki Pona.

For many years, Toki Pona boasts a thriving and enthusiastic community of tens of thousands of members in many countries around the world. This vibrant culture includes podcasts, magazines, online chatrooms, annual gatherings in multiple continents, international friendships, couples from two different countries, inter-cultural collaborations, literary contests, books, videos, courses (including in universities worldwide), video games, comics, an ISO code, a Bible translation project, and more.

Today, Toki Pona and Esperanto are the two most successful constructed languages by most measurement criteria. Esperanto thrives more among the older generation, and Toki Pona surpasses Esperanto among the younger generation. To compare with much smaller proposals like Interlingua, Lidepla, Elefen, Globasa, Kokanu, and Pandunia, see the IAL community size chart below.

Main Points

Comparisons with Esperanto 🌐

Ideology 💡

Esperanto

  • The initial hope in the Final Victory (when the entire world will adopt and speak a European-style language) has been critiqued as idealistic and even unintentionally imperialistic or racist. (By what reasoning does giving prominence to European source languages and speaking styles establish linguistic or cultural equality throughout the world?)
  • Homaranismo is an ethical philosophy promoting universal human solidarity and mutual respect beyond ethnic and religious boundaries.
  • More recent Manifestos (Rauma 1980, Prague 1996) have emphasized cultivating Esperanto culture as a self-chosen language minority and promoting linguistic diversity.

Toki Pona

  • Initial descriptions emphasized simplifying one’s thoughts, communication between people from different cultures, positive thinking, artistic self-expression, and meditating on the meanings of things. (Toki Pona: The Language of Good, p. 9–12)
  • In recent years, Toki Pona has proven itself as a powerful, versatile, and general-purpose language, limited only by the user’s skill. (See Technical Language below.)
  • “Analytic encoding […] is a very liberating act. […] Toki Pona is a liberating ideology.” (Dr. Laura Michaelis)
  • Many advocates of Toki Pona oppose the idea of a single global language, because large lingua francas can harm regional, minority, and indigenous languages. Languages like Toki Pona and Esperanto should be learned and appreciated for their own value, not as tools for other agendas.
  • Toki Pona owes a lot to Esperanto. Its birth and success wouldn’t be possible without the earlier work of our pioneer Zamenhof.

Vocabulary 🧠

Esperanto

  • Copies most concepts wholesale from 19th century European culture. Examples from the Universala Vortaro and Oficialaj Aldonoj include dedicated words for iĥtiokolo (fish glue), kafo (coffee), frako (tailcoat).
  • Number of words to learn:
  • Requires a decent amount of memorization work, but easier for speakers of European languages
  • As an Esperanto speaker myself, I sometimes forget the difference between dozens of sweet baked goods:
    • biskvito (dry, with long shelf life), blino (thicker than a krespo), brioĉo (with eggs, ball-shaped), kataifo (made from threads), kekso (hard), krespo (thin, fried, with eggs), kuk(et)o (general), moĉio (steamed, ball-shaped), patkuko (flat), platkuko (flat, with eggs), skono (Scottish), torto (with a garnish), vaflo (baked in an iron)
  • Huge amount of words benefits finding rhymes
fish gluetailcoat

Toki Pona

  • Starts with about 131 core and common words (plus 10 uncommon words) that represent broad universal concepts. Vocabulary is the easy part!
  • The fun or challenge or skill consists of building meaning by combining them while paying attention to the level of detail that the context actually calls for (see Pragmatics below):
    • fish glue
      • ko kala
        sticky substance related to fish
    • coffee
      • Enough for most situations:
        telo wawa (stimulant beverage), telo pimeja (black beverage), telo seli (hot beverage), telo (the beverage), etc.
      • Ultra-specific and contrived:
        telo wawa pimeja seli
        hot black stimulant beverage
    • tailcoat
      • In everyday situations, 1 to 3 content words are enough:
        len pi mani mute (expensive garment), len pimeja (black garment), len suli mije (man’s large or important garment), len (the garment), etc.
      • Overexplaining for absolute clarity or in descriptive writing:
        len sijelo suli pimeja mije pi mani mute li kama tu lon anpa.
        (The man’s long black torso-garment of much money becomes two at the bottom.)
  • For sweet grains, pan suwi is modified if really necessary:
    • pi telo ala (dry), awen (lasting), suli (large, thick), pi sike mama (with eggs), sike (round, ball-shaped), pi linja mute (of long thin strands), kiwen (hard), ko (semisolid, soft), pi seli kon (heated by air), lili (small, thin), lipu (flat and flexible), pi seli ko (heated in a viscous substance), pi nasin Alapa (in the Scottish manner), pi insa kili (with a fruit filling), namako (spiced, salted, garnished), pi seli kiwen (heated with an iron), pi leko mute (with many squares)
  • These compounds are not lexicalized or set in stone. there’s no memorization involved, only common sense explanations, contextual interpretations, and asking for more information if something is not clear.

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies context. According to the first of Grice’s Maxims, competent speakers provide the right amount of information, not too much, not too little: just enough detail based on what the listener or reader already knows or can figure out from the context. This informs whether an entire sentence is needed or just a single word.

Pronunciation 🗣️

Esperanto

  • “The Esperanto phonological system is almost entirely Polish.” (Walter Żelazny)
  • Some barriers from an international perspective:
    • Many affricates and sibilants must be distinguished: c /ts/, dz /dz/, ĉ /tʃ/, ĝ /dʒ/, ŝ /ʃ/, ĵ /ʒ/
    • /f/ is not found natively in many world languages: Korean, Bengali, Tamil, Tagalog, Indonesian
    • Distinguishes /r/ and /l/, unlike Japanese or Korean
    • Allows consonant clusters: sciencfikcio /stsientsfiktsio/ (sci-fi), postscio /poststsio/ (hindsight), disŝpruci /disʃprutsi/ (to gush out and disperse), kvakeroj /kvakeroj/ (Quakers)

Toki Pona

  • Very universal and accessible phonology
  • Having fewer phonemes means that names are harder to recognize until Tokiponization patterns are learned, e.g. ma Apika (Africa), toki Kanse (français)

Proper Names 🏷️

Esperanto

  • Mainly uses exonyms that are widespread and easy to recognize by outsiders, e.g. la japana lingvo (日本語 Nihongo), Germanujo or Germanio (Deutschland), Sud-Koreujo or Sud-Koreio (한국 Hanguk).
  • Sometimes uses the person as the base word, adding -ujo or -io for the country, e.g. italo (Italian person) → Italujo or Italio (Italy)
  • Sometimes uses the country as the base word, adding -ano for the person, e.g. Usono (United States) → Usonano (American person)

Toki Pona

  • Always uses endonyms that reflect how ethnic groups, languages or territories normally prefer to call themselves, e.g. toki Nijon (日本語 Nihongo), ma Tosi (Deutschland), ma Anku (한국 Hanguk).
  • Uses kulupu for a group of people, ma for a territory, toki for a language, jan (pi) ma for a resident or citizen of a country, jan (pi) kulupu for a person of an ethnic group or community.
  • Head nouns mean you always know what category is being talked about, e.g. jan Muwama (person named Muhammad), telo Tana (body of water named Tana), ilo Kuko (a technology called Google), kulupu Kuko (a company called Google), etc.

Gender ⚧️

Esperanto

  • For many very common words, male is the default, and the female is like a type of man:
    • viro (man) and virino (woman)
      (from the Latin word for man and not woman)
    • onklo (uncle) and onklino (aunt)
      (from the French word for uncle and not aunt)
    • grafo (count) and grafino (countess)
      (from the German word for count)
    In some cases, the feminine word refers to the wife of this more important man.
  • For a second category of words, gender is not marked, e.g. instruisto (teacher of any gender)
  • Only two animate singular pronouns, li (he) and ŝi (she).
  • New words and suffixes have been proposed, e.g. ri (singular they), -ip (non-binary equivalent of -in). Used by some and opposed by some. The Akademio de Esperanto refuses to either accept or reject them as “official”. (Hopefully the matter will be resolved in the next generation.)

Toki Pona

  • By default, words are not marked for gender:
    • ona means “he, she, they, it”
    • mama means parent of any gender
      (from the Georgian word მამა mama, meaning father)
  • The words mije (male, masculine), meli (female, feminine) or tonsi (non-binary, transgender, gender non-conforming) may be added as needed.

Writing System ✍️

Esperanto

  • Based on the Latin alphabet, adding 6 additional letters with diacritics: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ
    • One letter, one sound

Toki Pona

  • sitelen Lasina based on the Latin alphabet
    • One letter, one sound
  • sitelen pona glyphs are optional, but very popular and fun
    • One symbol, one word
    • Logograms depict concepts:
      • soweli fuzzy creature, land animal
      • pan wheat, rice
      • kasi plant, vegetation
      • len cloth, fabric

Sign Language 🤟

Esperanto

  • Signuno (a signed exact language based on Esperanto) not in use. Manually coded languages, which are signed versions of oral languages, are often critiqued and rejected by Deaf communities for reinforcing the dominance of hearing culture and lacking the clarity and expressiveness of full-featured sign languages.
  • International Sign is now the standard used by the international Deaf community for cross-language communication, but has nothing to do with Esperanto and no documented use at Esperanto gatherings.

Toki Pona

  • Luka Pona Sign Language (LPSL), developed in 2020 with large contributions from jan Olipija, is currently in active use within the Toki Pona community, especially among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, non-speaking, and neurodivergent members. It features vocabulary similar to Toki Pona but has a grammar based on sign language linguistics.
  • Earlier proposals of signed exact languages, such as Toki Pona Sign Language (2013) and toki pona luka (2014), are largely unused and discontinued. Manually coded languages are often critiqued and rejected by Deaf communities for reinforcing the dominance of hearing culture and lacking the clarity and expressiveness of full-featured sign languages.

Generational Differences 👵👶

Esperanto

  • Almost 140 years of history means speakers of all ages with access to generational knowledge and institutions.
  • More popular than Toki Pona on older platforms, e.g. Facebook
  • Small percentage of native speakers

Toki Pona

  • First draft published in 2001, but language only exploded in popularity in last decade.
  • Most fluent speakers are aged between 15 and 30.
  • More popular than Esperanto on younger platforms, e.g. Discord, Bluesky, and the fediverse
  • Fewer institutions and more decentralized, self-organized and youth-driven
  • Claims of native speakers have been refuted

Common Misconceptions 🤔

Imagined Confusion or Limitations 🙃

Misconception: “Toki Pona is too limited or restrictive. Speakers won’t understand each other, or it will make you dumb.”

Truth: Whenever you need complete and maximum clarity, documented projects like lipu ku prove that the large speaking community has more than enough short and converging ways that are stable and mainstream to translate over 11,000 common English words. If necessary for even more precision, you can always add one or two extra words or convert your idea to a full sentence. Like in any language, if you don’t understand something, you can just ask the other person what they mean. In real situations among skilled speakers, this doesn’t happen anywhere as often as non-speakers or beginners think it might.

You’re always encouraged to be more creative and come up with ways to combine words and sentences on your own and on the fly. Constrained writing makes you creative and think outside the box. Lateral thinking is fun to solve problems. “[Toki Pona] is a language that forces constant creativity.” (Elaine Gold, Executive Director of the Canadian Language Museum)

Technical Language 🛠️

Misconception: “Toki Pona only works for basic things. More technical communication is impossible.”

Truth: Experienced users who understand the subject matter are able to comfortably talk about everything.

Examples of domain-specific Toki Pona:

A normal approach is to use a sentence or noun phrase when you first bring up or explain a more complicated concept, then shorten it to just one or two words when mentioning it afterwards.

If you don’t understand the subject matter, then Toki Pona does prevent you from parroting technical terms or buzzwords without thinking about their meaning first or understanding them. See also Practicality as a World Language.

Numbers 🔢

Misconception: “Toki Pona’s number system seems underdeveloped or impractical.”

Truth: The basic number system, suitable for general things, is:

The secondary system (introduced in lipu pu 2014) adds more precision when necessary:

In the spirit of Toki Pona, you’re also encouraged to not get overly hung up on exact large numbers and instead to describe their subjective or situational meaning when that is what you really intend. Is 72 a lot (mute), enough (mute pona), too much (mute ike)? For you, is 8:30 the beginning of the sun period or the time of brushing one’s teeth?

See also Practicality as a World Language.

New Words (nimi sin) ✨

Misconception: “The community will create new words for everything.”

Truth: Toki Pona among experienced speakers is surprisingly stable.

While there’s no language police to ruin the fun or to stop new Toki Pona learners (and even experienced users) from creating and tinkering with new words for their own enjoyment, extremely few of these have been adopted in serious mainstream usage.

This means that today, only 11 non-pu words are core or common. Of these, only 3 words are new and were created by the community in the last 10 years: n, soko, tonsi.

If we allow for uncommon words, which most speakers don’t use, then there’s only epiku, jasima, lanpan, linluwi, majuna, meso, su.

Of the obscure words, only kokosila, usawi, kiki come close to the threshold for becoming uncommon.

Conlang Conflict and Coexistence ⚔️🤝

Misconception: “Esperanto and Toki Pona are somehow at odds. There can only be one conlang!”

Truth: Many Toki Pona speakers also enjoy Esperanto, and many Esperanto speakers also enjoy Toki Pona. The rapid growth of Toki Pona is not a threat. We are friends. Let people enjoy things. We can strengthen and support each other.

Less Common Misconceptions

Practicality as a World Language 🌍

Misconception: Toki Pona is too minimalist or artistic for practical inter-cultural communication. Its vocabulary could be larger or more egalitarian.

Truth: This myth is usually perpetuated by people who dream of an international auxiliary language (IAL). They read an incomplete description of Toki Pona and never studied its advanced features. They might champion creative forks and proposed offshoots of Toki Pona that keep changing, such as toki ma or Kokanu. Some might enjoy entirely new and original projects like Lidepla, Globasa, and Pandunia. Compare the size of their communities:

Toki Pona has already been classified as a “world language” by ISO standardization, due to its large number of speakers that live across many countries, its many years of stability, and its wide range of published texts, as well as videos, music, podcasts, and games. As of yet, none of these newer IAL proposals have achieved such milestones.

Practical inter-cultural communication was one of the design goals of Toki Pona since its earliest descriptions. In lipu pu, this got summarized as “When people from different cultures need to communicate, they must focus on the elements that are most universal to our human experience.”

The vocabulary of Toki Pona already draws on a wide array of languages from around the world, including Indo-European (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic), prior constructed languages (Esperanto, Lojban), Uralic (Finnish), Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin, Cantonese), Kartvelian (Georgian), a Melanesian creole (Tok Pisin), Niger–Congo (Akan, Swahili), Austronesian (Tongan), Japonic (Japanese), Inuit–Yupik–Unangan (Inuktitut), and Algic (Anishinaabemowin).

Although Toki Pona is optimized with very few words, it works just fine in real world situations as it was designed without any confusion. Even if a non-speaker or beginner might incorrectly assume it relies too much on context or that technical communication would be harder, the large number of experienced Toki Pona speakers also manage this without any problems! (This skill issue is normal for any language.) The basic features of Toki Pona allow you to be as vague or as highly specific as you personally desire or as the situation calls for by just adding one or two words or using a normal sentence.

The phonology of Toki Pona was deliberately designed to be accessible worldwide, ensuring that no minimal pairs would create confusion or discomfort. By contrast, most IAL proposals include distinctions that actually pose barriers to international communication:

contrast IAL proposals challenges in major world languages
/h/ vs. no consonant Esperanto, Kokanu, Lidepla, Globasa, Pandunia French, Italian, many varieties of Brazilian Portuguese
/r/ vs. /l/ Esperanto, Interlingua, Lidepla, Globasa, Pandunia Japanese, Korean, colloquial Thai
/f/ vs. /p/ Esperanto, Interlingua, Lidepla, Globasa, Pandunia Japanese, Korean, many Philippine languages, Finnish, some varieties of Chinese
/v/ vs. /w/ Interlingua, Lidepla, Globasa Hindi-Urdu, other large South Asian languages, some varieties of Arabic, German, Japanese
/s/ vs. /z/ Esperanto, Interlingua, Lidepla, Globasa, Pandunia Mandarin, Malay-Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Finnish
/ti/, /t͡ʃi/, /ʃi/, /t͡si/, /si/ Esperanto, Interlingua, Toki Ma, Kokanu, Lidepla, Globasa, Pandunia Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and so many languages with palatalization or affrication

Sonja has always encouraged Toki Pona as a springboard for creativity. Offshoots of Toki Pona can absolutely be fun for their own sake and on their own merits. In the niche world of conlangs, we should aim to be friends and wish all projects well, even if much fewer people use these. Many Toki Pona offshoots offer very useful and original ideas and have noticable communities: luka pona and tuki tiki are great examples! Independent projects like Lidepla, Globasa, and Pandunia even have noticable communities that appear on the lower end of some charts. However, if any IAL-style conlang frames its reason for existing or its potential future strength based specifically on imagined problems and missing features in Toki Pona, that’s simply a misunderstanding and even ungracious.

If someone’s real intention is to extend Toki Pona (as some projects state), then why not learn the basics of Toki Pona first, participate in the large speaking community, and only adjust any finer points later without proposing breaking changes to the existing language? This successful approach has led to a few advanced styles of Toki Pona that have been considered standard and well-supported options for many years now, such as figurative meanings of existing words and nasin nanpa pona (for very large numbers like years).

Despite being a successful small world language and meeting the criteria of an IAL listed on this page, Toki Pona never presumptuously claimed itself to be an IAL. I believe we should not try to convert the world to our constructed languages. Those who really enjoy and find practical and social value in these small world languages will organically discover them on their own, through their friends, or from other types of cultural exposure. If or when the world really needs an IAL one day (that is not a zonal lingua franca like English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Arabic, or Malay-Indonesian), then I believe that will happen naturally and gradually within people’s hearts with a grassroots approach (which Esperantists call desubismo as opposed to politically imposed desuprismo).

Newspeak 👁️

Misconception: Toki Pona sounds like Newspeak.

Truth: In the dystopian novel 1984, an authoritarian regime designed Newspeak to suppress free expression, dissent, and rebellion by making such ideas impossible to express.

In contrast, Toki Pona promotes positive communication and encourages the full range of self-expression with universal concepts. As linguist Dr. Laura Michaelis said: “So analytic encoding, as we see in Toki Pona, is freedom. there is nothing nefarious about Toki Pona, I can promise you. […] That’s a very liberating act. So in that sense, I believe Toki Pona is a liberating ideology.”

Stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples or Creole Speakers ⚠️

Misconception: Toki Pona sounds like a language spoken on a remote tropical island by an imagined group of people with a traditional lifestyle.

Truth: Please be careful. “Terms like […] ‘primitive’ have been used […] since the colonial era, reinforcing the idea that [these people] are backward. This idea is both incorrect and very dangerous.” (Survival International) “The ASA does not support the use of the term ‘tribal’ to describe people.” (Association of Social Anthropologists) Reducing other cultures, languages, or their phonologies to an “exotic” aesthetic or an imagined vibe is very problematic.

Although Toki Pona was initially constructed by a person, it’s now a real and living language spoken by thousands of real people from a variety of cultures, lifestyles, and landscapes around the world. The language was designed to be as universal as possible to describe the human experience in any society, without being biased by any specific one. While it draws influences from a large number of languages around the world (including a creole called Tok Pisin), Toki Pona is its own unique framework designed to encourage clarity in thinking and creativity. Some people have commented that Toki Pona’s simple phonology can feel similar to Hawaiian and Rotokas, which also have small phonologies, but that is coincidental and was to make Toki Pona easy to pronounce for everyone. Just because a language has a small phonology doesn’t mean anything about the culture that speaks it. Also, Indigenous languages are among those with the most complex phonologies.

Many contact languages, such as pidgins and creoles, do have a streamlined morphology to help bridge communication gaps between groups from different languages. Pidgins typically appear as simplified languages for trade or basic communication. When they become a community’s first language, they develop into creoles and typically gain more features in the process.

Indigenous languages are a different category. They include over half of the world’s 7,000 or so living languages, so it’s hard to generalize. They typically have highly intricate grammars and morphologies. It’s a harmful myth to think that they (or the cultures that speak them) are somehow “simple”.

By complete coincidence, an Indigenous language that seems to have a handful of similarities to Toki Pona is Apáitisí (also called Pirahã). Sonja only became aware of it after 2008, when the book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes came out. Descriptions of Apáitisí aren’t without controversy, but apparently the language also has a small phonology, handles numbers and dependent clauses in a way similar to Toki Pona, and has a single non-gendered word for ‘parent, mother, father’.

Taoism ☯️

Misconception: Toki Pona is based on Taoism.

Truth: Sonja Lang was reading Taoist texts (among many other things!) around the time she felt inspired to create the language, so it briefly got mentioned in the earliest drafts. When the language was ready to present to the world in lipu pu, she showcased a variety of spiritual and inspirational texts, including a single sentence from the Dào Dé Jīng. For the Chinese name of Toki Pona, my friend James Wong came up with the phono-semantic matching 道本语 Dàoběnyǔ, which literally means ‘road book language’, just like German means ‘virtuous language’ in Chinese. But generally speaking, the link to Taoism has been exaggerated or blown out of proportion.

Anarcho-Primitivism 🏹

Misconception: Toki Pona is based on anarcho-primitivism.

Truth: Also around the time she started the language, Sonja was reading works by Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist who challenged and dispelled Eurocentric stereotypes about hunter-gatherers and other Indigenous peoples. This is one of many perspectives that may have shaped the creation of Toki Pona as a universal artistic language that tried to reflect the realities of all human societies, not only Western ones.

Sonja also remembers reading an article by John Zerzan, a more provocative anarcho-primitivist philosopher who lacks any anthropological training. At the time, she was just 23, sensitive, deeply introspective, and disenchanted with the world.

When compiling lipu pu, this topic was considered irrelevant, misleading, or harmful, so it was deliberately not included. Nevertheless, because this briefly got mentioned in the earliest drafts, people sometimes bring it up, so there’s still a need to dispel or clarify it. See also Cultural Stereotypes above.


back to tokipona.org