I’m too busy being dead, modding, etc to figure out what it is.
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. When the first official book released it had only 120 words, and since it was handed over to the community to grow it has expanded to somewhere around 140 words.
It really started to take off in 2014 when the first official book was published. As of the 2022 Toki Pona census there was around 1800+ speakers of the language. It’s primarily spoken online and is considered one of the most popular conlangs (constructed languages) in the world.
Despite being a constructed language Toki Pona is a real language and is recognized by several institutions. Unlike Esperanto, the most recognized constructed language, Toki Pona is not intended to be an International Auxiliary Language. (IAL)
For more information I recommend checking these out!:
Excerpts of this especially the bit about its focus on simplicity sound like good sidebar material
Ooh good idea! I trimmed it down a bit and put it there, thank you!
which institutes recognize it?
Toki Pona received it’s ISO 639-3 identifier in January of 2022 which makes it a recognized language internationally and online.
Getting an ISO code has several benefits one is that by receiving a code the language is given an HTML and XML attribute that allows authors to mark Toki Pona text in a WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliant way. This metadata enables unambiguous language detection, which will in the future enable support for Toki Pona hyphenation and ligature rules, speech synthesis, and spelling and grammar checking.
Some of those listed are actively being worked on, grammar checking programs for Toki Pona have seen some success as seen in this academic paper from the University of Hawai’i.
To me the most exciting thing about receiving an ISO code is that it makes publishing books in Toki Pona a lot easier. Since receiving the ISO code several books have been published in Toki Pona, most notably however was an original translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz titled “jan Osu pi wawa nasa” in Toki Pona’s logographic writing system called sitelen pona. This book plays a very key role in the ongoing effort to see sitelen pona receive it’s own Unicode block!
Anyways to avoid getting off track, Toki Pona also has received a language code from Glottolog and an IETF BCP 47 language tag from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These are also big gains but I am less educated on them so I won’t speak on them. Toki Pona has appeared in many academic papers (like the one seen above!) and those papers should all be easily searchable if you wanna take a crawl through some interesting linguistic studies!
Thanks for the detailed reply! I knew about the ISO code, but not of its benefits.
