Recently, I have been engaged in a personal project that has had a surprising tie-in to my professional work, and I would like to share a little bit about it. It was back in 2016 that I first heard about Toki Pona. Toki Pona is a constructed language created by the linguist Sonja Lang in the early 2000's. The unique aspect of Toki Pona is that it only has around 120 words. Now, many people's (including mine) first reaction to this is "What? That's ridiculous, you can't have a functioning language with only 120 words!", but my time spent learning the language has shown me just how wrong this initial impression is.

Over the last eight years my interest in Toki Pona ebbed and flowed, but starting a few months ago, I really go into it, and now I feel like I am actually well on my way to having truly "learned" the language. As part of this journey, I have been introduced to the incredibly dedicated online community that has sprung up around this language. There is an active subreddit, many Discord servers, scores of online lessons, Youtube channels, translations of famous works, creative writing competitions, and even real-life meet ups of Tokiponists. My (admittedly limited) experience being in these spaces so far has really shown me that not only is Toki Pona a fully capable language in its own right, in which people can express themselves in all manner of ways, but that learning it is actually an incredibly useful exercise for those of us who care about effectively communicating complex ideas.

This is because Toki Pona's limited vocabulary forces the speaker to not only be very deliberate about word choice, but to also adequately explain the context of what they are talking about. Words in Toki Pona, rather than defining narrow concepts, refer to broad semantic spaces. For example, 'moku' can refer to food, drink, a meal, a snack, the act of eating, the act of drinking, or even just ingesting any substance. Its broad semantic space is just "food and consumption". Therefore, the sentence "mi moku e moku" can mean "I eat dinner" or "I ate a snack" or even "I am going to guzzle down a 64oz Monster Energy/Coke slushie". As a result, clear communication relies heavily on properly establishing the context of the topics you are discussing. This makes it clear whether the food is a meal, a snack, or some frosted drink monstrosity.

These lessons, being deliberate in word choice and establishing clear contexts, are some of the same lessons that are important to understand when trying to communicate technical ideas to a general audience. You must be deliberate in your word choice, avoiding jargon and technical language. You must establish context, giving adequate background about what you're discussing, and highlighting why the audience should care about what you're saying. Learning to be a good Tokiponist therefore requires honing the same skills required to be a good science communicator. This idea is really well articulated by jan Telakoman, a well-regarded Tokiponist in this blog post. (The post is originally written in Toki Pona, however there is a literal English translation. It will be understandable, but it won't sound like natural English. Look at the blog to learn more.)

When I first started learning Toki Pona seriously a few months ago, I thought it was just a fun little side project that would at most maybe make it easier to learn another "real" language down the line. But, I quickly saw how valuable Toki Pona can be to someone who cares about clear and concise communication, and I would recommend that anyone with similar interests spend some time learning about this incredible language.

Finally, just for fun, here is a translation I did of the story of the Lambton Worm (English included).

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