What do you think of this fact?
English and German each have hundreds of thousands of words. And then there’s Toki Pona. This language gets by with roughly 120 words. Not as a starter vocabulary, but in total.
A language for simple thoughts
Toki Pona was created by Canadian translator Sonja Lang. She posted the first drafts online in 2001. She developed the language during a rough period in her life, as a kind of tool for simplifying her thoughts. Among other things, she drew on Taoism and the question of what it would be like to live simply as a person in nature and name things in the most basic way.
“Toki pona” translates to “the language of good.” In her 2014 book, Lang presented about 120 main words, and a 2021 dictionary lists 137 essential words.
A building kit, not a dictionary
So how do you say everything with so few words? You combine them. Describing words simply follow the thing they describe: “sike loje mi” is literally “ball red me,” meaning “my red ball.” Many words have very broad meanings, and context does the rest. “mi moku” can mean “I eat,” but also “I am food.”
The sound system is just as minimalist: there are only 14 sounds, nine consonants and five vowels. Names get adapted to fit. “John” becomes “San,” and “English” becomes “Inli.”
Besides the Latin alphabet, Toki Pona has its own pictographic script called “sitelen pona,” which looks a bit like hieroglyphs.
Now it’s official
An online community has kept the language alive for over 20 years, on Discord, Reddit and forums, and sometimes at real-life meetups in cities like Berlin or Amsterdam. Estimates from 2021 put the number of speakers somewhere between 500 and 5,000.
Then in January 2022 came the big moment: Toki Pona received the ISO 639-3 code “tok,” an official international language code, after earlier applications had been rejected. That puts the mini language on the same list as English, German and thousands of other languages.
Fewer words, more creativity: toki pona li pona.