Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/September 2009

Toki Pona is a constructed language first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.

Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 120 root words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.

The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, has led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak. Find out more...