The Etymology of Every Toki Pona Word

What is Toki Pona?

Toki Pona is a constructed language (or ‘conlang’): a language that was invented for a specific purpose. The language’s creator, linguist Sonja Lang, constructed the language with minimalism in mind: the original Toki Pona Book published in 2014 (Toki Pona: the Language of Good) lists only 120 words. After a little expansion by both the creator and the community, we have a total of 139 words to put in my image.

The simplicity of the language is intended to aid in the simplification of thought and communication. Language is one of the lenses through which we perceive the world, and ourselves. By simplifying that lens, we can also aim to simplify how we think; decluttering our thoughts while also disconnecting them from the preconceptions built into our natural languages. Toki Pona has also been created with an inherent “cuteness” and positivity to it; fittingly, the name of the language simply means “good language”, in Toki Pona.

This less-is-more philosophy also makes Toki Pona a relatively easy language to learn, no matter your linguistic background. It has simple grammar; uses a small inventory of 14 sounds that are common across languages globally; and adapts its slim vocabulary from a wide pool of different languages.

Although the number of individual words is small, each word can cover multiple definitions, many of which wouldn’t fit in my image. The word “supa” for example can mean table, bed, floor, plate, shelf, or basically any horizontal surface something might rest on. Meanwhile “ko” as a noun can refer to clay, paste, powder, or a clump; or it can be an adjective, to mean viscous, sticky, or squishy.

More complex ideas can be created by combining these words together. For example, the recent Toki Pona translation of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” translates the word “scarecrow” as “jan pi weka waso“, or “person of bird removal”. Similarly, the cowardly lion is “soweli wawa pi pilin monsuta“, or “the strong beast of fearful feelings”, and the emerald city is “ma tomo pi kiwen laso“, literally “the residential land of blue-green minerals”. This versatility makes Toki Pona a complete language: despite its simplicity, it can be used to write about or discuss any topic. This has allowed Toki Pona to become the common language of a growing online community of devoted users.

My images

With other languages, I might make etymology images grouping words by meaning: an image about the origins of colours, numbers, or days of the week for example. But Toki Pona has only 5 individual words colours, 6 words for numbers (translating as ‘nothing’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘many/3+/twenty’, ‘hand/five’, and ‘all/hundred’), and weekdays are simply numbered. Also, many words can have such broad and varied meanings that grouping them by definition doesn’t really make sense anyway. So instead, I’ve simply made one poster-sized image with every Toki Pona word in it. With its limited vocabulary, Toki Pona must be the only language in the world where that’s possible.

I had a lot of help with this image from Sonja Lang herself, proofreading and checking over the (many) mistakes I made along the way, and making sure my list included every relevant word in the language. It was a unique experience being able to consult the creator of a language I was researching, and I couldn’t have made the image as exhaustive and accurate as it is without her help.

That said, it should be noted that this image doesn’t necessarily capture the true complexity of the etymology. While I’ve shown one etymology for each word, some may be influenced by multiple words and/or from multiple languages. This is true for many words in natural languages too.

Some words include an asterisk to show that they are uncommon. Sometimes this is because the word is largely obsolete, while in other cases the word is so new it hasn’t become widespread in the community.

Each Toki Pona word in my image is accompanied by a symbol, or sitelen pona. This is the hieroglyphic writing system of Toki Pona, with each symbol representing a word. A handful of words have two different sitelen pona, sometimes with different connotations. These symbols are often linked to their meanings in obvious ways, making them surprisingly easy to learn: even just in the time I spent putting the image together, I feel like I’ve picked up many of them. Sonja even helped me translate my name into Toki Pona: you can now call me “jan pi ilo open mun” (person of the star-key). You can see this written in sitelen pona at the top of each image.

As well as my main poster, I’ve also made 10 images grouping languages by etymology. Let’s start with Toki Pona’s largest etymological contributor, Finnish.

Words from Finnish

These 19 Finnish-derived words make up 13.7% of Toki Pona words. One word that stands out here is kijetesantakalu, by far Toki Pona’s longest word. It was coined as an April Fools’ joke in 2009, and is a fun contrast to the usually very efficient and concise nature of the language.

Words from Tok Pisin

Toki Pona words from Tok Pisin make up 11.5% of the language. Tok Pisin is an English based creole language from Papua New Guinea. It is a lingua franca of PNG, allowing a majority of the population to communicate in a common tongue, despite the nation having 840 regional languages. Being an English based creole, the majority of Tok Pisin vocabulary is borrowed from English: “tok” is from English “talk”, and “pisin” is from “pidgin” (which is in turn from a Chinese Pidgin English borrowing of “business”). In this image I’ve included the Tok Pisin word that each Toki Pona word comes from, as well as the source of each Tok Pisin word.

Toki Pona words from Esperanto

Esperanto is the source of 10.8% of Toki Pona words. It is the world’s most famous and widely spoken conlang. It was designed as a global “auxiliary language”: a language for shared communication for people across the planet. It borrows its vocabulary from widely spoken languages like English, German, French, and Spanish. Because Esperanto is itself a constructed language, here I’ve tried to show the origin of each Esperanto word too. However, Esperanto’s creator intentionally used words that are common or similar across multiple languages, which can make pinning down singular etymologies impossible. For example, I’ve shown Esperanto “domo” as being from Latin “domus“, but in reality the word is also derived from Polish dom, Russian дом (dom), and Ancient Greek δόμος (dómos), all also meaning “house”. For cases like this I’ve simply put a “+” to show that I’m not really telling the full story.

Words from Serbo-Croat-Bosnian

Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are three closely related language varieties in the Western South Slavic grouping. They are the source of 9.4% of Toki Pona words. Due to their close relationship and shared linguistic heritage, I’ve grouped them here under the Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB) umbrella, and shown each source-word in both the Cyrillic and Latin script.

Words Acadian French

The Acadian variety of French is spoken in the Acadia region of eastern Canada. It is the source of 8.6% of Toki Pona vocab.

Words from Dutch

Dutch is the source of 7.9% of Toki Pona words.

Words from Georgian

Georgian is the source of 7.9% of Toki Pona words.

Words from English

These 10 words from English comprise 7.2% of Toki Pona vocab.

Words from Chinese

Cantonese and Mandarin each give 5 words to Toki Pona, or about 3.6% of the total vocab. These are closely related languages within the Chinese language group, so they share this image. Together they are the source of 7.2% of Toki Pona.

Words from other origins

Three languages have given 2 words to Toki Pona: Greek, Japanese, and Welsh each contribute 1.4% of the language.

Then we have 9 languages that give only 1 word to Toki Pona (0.7% of the total). These are Akan (a Ghanaian language), Danish (leko is from the same source as “Lego”), Hindi, Inupiaq (an Inuit language), Lojban (another conlang), Ojibwe (also called Anishinaabemowinan Native American language from the Great Lakes region), Scottish Gaelic, Tongan (from the Pacific island of Tonga), and Turkish.

Next are 4 a priori words, invented specifically for Toki Pona without any other source language. These are “e” (a grammatical marker), and 3 words that describe using or referencing one of the official Toki Pona books. “Pu” refers to the first guide book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, which contained the first 120 words. “ku” refers to the Toki Pona Dictionary, which added an additional 17 words. And “su” refers to the illustrated Toki Pona story books, of which one (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) has been published so far. This book resulted in the addition of the word “su” to the language, as well as “majuna” to mean “old”, a word from before the first Toki Pona book. That brings us to the total of 139 shown in my image.

And last but not least, we have 3 Toki Pona words that are simply onomatopoeic: “a” is used to denote emotion or exclamation (similar like English “ah!”), “mu” means the noise of an animal (like a more generalised version of English “moo”, “meow” etc.), and “n” is used to show thinking or humming, like English “hmm” or “um”.

So there we go, the origin of all 139 words in Toki Pona!

This is the first (and undoubtably the last) time I’ve ever shown every single word of a language in a single image. It was a fascinating project, and a great jumping-off point for me to learn about Toki Pona. I now have all 3 Toki Pona books, and I recommend them to anyone who wants to learn about this unique and unusual language. You can also go to the Toki Pona Website to learn more.

If you enjoyed this post, let me know with a comment on my Facebook page, or if you feel like dropping some pennies in the Starkey Comics hat, consider donating to me on Patreon. This post was a lot of work, and I’d love to hear what people think of it. Positive feedback will also encourage me to make more images about Toki Pona in the future.

Pona tawa sina!