↩ Toki Pona FAQ

Toki Pona for Kids 👦🏻👧🏽🧒🏿👧🏼

I often receive messages from:

Below is an example of a reply I sent in April 2025.

— Sonja Lang

raccoon drawing in a notebook

Email to a 6th Grader in the United States 📨


Hi A…! Nice to meet you.
Also, say hi from me to your family, teachers, and friends!

Thanks for your questions.

  1. Why did you start studying languages or making your own?
  2. How did you improve it over time?
  3. Why did you make it?
  4. How would you suggest someone start learning about languages?
  5. What school subjects helped you?
  6. What are some real-world uses of studying languages?
  7. How do children use Toki Pona?

1. Why did you start studying languages or making your own language (conlang)?

Short answer

I grew up speaking a type of French that not many people use or know about. That made me want to learn many languages and eventually create Toki Pona.

Long answer

I grew up in a French-speaking Acadian community in a city that English settlers called Moncton, in New Brunswick, Canada. 🍁 This place is in a land that the original Mi’kmaq people call Mi’kma’ki, where they have been living for a very long time. 🪶 Growing up, I saw that my family spoke a French dialect that was a minority language. 🥐 A dialect means a different way of speaking a language. A minority means a small number of people compared to everyone else.

Because of this, I got interested in learning as many languages as possible. In high school and college, I studied Spanish, Latin, and German. 🏫 On my own, I tried learning languages that weren’t in the same family as French and English, like Finnish 🇫🇮 (spoken in Europe) and Georgian 🇬🇪 (spoken near Russia). I wanted to learn how people from different places and cultures look at the world in their own ways. It’s like everyone wears different glasses, and I wanted to try seeing through all those different glasses. 🤓

pile of books to learn different languages

In my early 20s, I went through a hard time. 😔 Then suddenly I felt a creative idea ✨ or a strong picture of a new language in my mind. 🤯 It’s hard to explain, but I felt pushed to quickly write down how this new Toki Pona language works. ✍️ Maybe my brain was mixing the shapes of many other languages I studied and also added its own new ideas. 🧠 At first, it was just an art project 🎨 or a way for me to explore my feelings 🎭. I didn’t plan for it to become a small world language later. 🌐

Sonja thinking about Toki Pona

2. How did you improve your language over time?

Short answer

I first shared Toki Pona online in 2001. 💻 Many people around the world liked it, so I wrote books and listened to how they actually used the language to make it better. 📚

Long answer

I put my first version online in 2001. After that, I got busy with different jobs 👩🏻‍💻, because for most people, making your own language doesn’t pay the bills. 💲 While I was away, I was surprised to find out that tens of thousands of people around the world discovered Toki Pona on their own. 🌐 Many younger learners liked the simple way it talks about things. They began speaking Toki Pona in all kinds of real-life situations that I never thought of in the beginning. 💬

In 2014, I wrote my first book about Toki Pona, teaching the way I used it. 📘 For my second book in 2021 📓, I listened closely to how other people were speaking the language. 👂 This is called “descriptivism,” which means that language experts describe how most people actually use the language. We don’t say if we think their way of speaking is right or wrong. Even though I originally created Toki Pona, the language still grows and changes, only a little bit at a time, like all languages do. When people talk about new things, like the internet 🛜 or slang 😎, or how mushrooms 🍄 are different from plants 🌿 and vegetables 🫑, or things that are changing in our culture 🔄, they sometimes add a few new words.

3. Why did you make your language?

Short answer

I made Toki Pona to focus on what matters most in life. It doesn’t have many words, so you think about big ideas instead of tiny details. 💡

Long answer

During the difficult period in my life, I needed to think more deeply about what really matters. What’s around me? What’s important? What can help me solve my problems and be happy? What things are just small details that are not as important? Toki Pona has words for the bigger and more important ideas. But it has fewer or no words for very small details that might distract me. I wanted to see the big picture and not get lost in smaller things. 🏞️

This idea comes from “minimalism”, which means keeping things as simple as possible. In Toki Pona, we try to say a lot with a small number of words and grammar rules. Because there are so few words, each one has a very broad meaning. For example, in English, “woods” can mean a forest with many trees. 🌳 “Wood” can also mean the hard material from those trees. 🪵 And in a sport like golf, a “wood” means a type of stick. 🏌️

In Toki Pona, most words can mean many different things like that, but the ideas are all similar to each other. How do we know which idea the other person means? We understand each other in Toki Pona, because we also look at the situation around us. If the nurse says he needs to take some “red liquid” from my arm, I know he means “blood” 💉🩸, because we’re in a doctor’s clinic. 👨🏾‍⚕️ If I offer some “red liquid” to my friend during a picnic, she knows I mean “fruit punch” 🧃 and not blood, because there’s already fruit punch on the blanket, and she’s not a vampire. 🧛‍♀️ In a situation where blood and juice are both possible, we would instead say “body liquid” and “fruit liquid”. People who speak Toki Pona know what is important to say in what situation.

a nurse taking a red liquid versus offering a red liquid to a friend during a picnic

Toki Pona is like the simple art in some video games. The picture below only has a small number of little squares (called pixels), but your eye can easily see it’s a dog. We don’t need thousands of tiny details of every hair to give the idea of a dog. Almost all languages have thousands and thousands of words you need to learn and hope everyone elso has also studied the same words. But in Toki Pona, you only need to learn around 120 to 140 words. If you and your friend know Toki Pona, those easier words are enough to share all your ideas, and your friend will understand what you mean. They can look at the situation you’re both in, and their mind will fill in any tiny details you didn’t need to say.

4. How would you suggest someone start learning about languages (linguistics)?

Short answer

If your family speaks another language, start by learning it. Then try a language very different from English: maybe an Indigenous language, a sign language, or even a conlang like Toki Pona.

Long answer

If your family speaks any languages that are not English, I think a good place to start is to learn one of those languages! You can impress your grandparents or write them a note about your curiosity about languages. 👵👴

After that, or if your family originally came from a place like England that speaks English, I think it’s a good idea to pick a language that is very different from English or very different from the language your family speaks. Try to find a group of people who speak that language where you live, so you can make friends with kids of your age in that community.

Sometimes you can learn an Indigenous language like Choctaw in your particular area. 🪶 Indigenous means a group of people who speak a different language, because they lived in the land for a long time before Europeans arrived and made their favorite language like English, Spanish, or French very common. 👨‍🌾

Sometimes it could be another language that, like English, was originally from another place in the world, like Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hindi–Urdu, Vietnamese, Hausa, or Persian. Maybe you already have friends, family members, or neighbors who speak languages like these! 🌏 Personally, I’m in love with Malay–Indonesian.

Or it might be a sign language like American Sign Language (ASL), used by Deaf people. That means people who don’t hear, so they will move their hands and bodies to talk silently with other people who don’t hear, their families, and friends. 🤟

Finally, it could be a language that was created by a person in the past, like Toki Pona 🌞 or Esperanto 💚. These are called constructed languages or conlangs. Today, tens of thousands of people speak Toki Pona. So the international group called ISO considers it a world language. But remember that not a lot of people speak conlangs compared to the other types of languages I mentioned. Some people think Toki Pona can help build friendships with people from other cultures in a fair way 🤝 without using a language like English. Other people think it’s more like a social hobby for art 🎨, creativity ✨, and personal growth 🌱, like playing a musical instrument 🪈, doing crafts with your hands ✂️, or joining a sport ⚽. Some people think kids should wait until they’re teenagers before they learn Toki Pona. What do you and your family think? 👪

5. What school subjects helped you make your language?

Short answer

In school, take any language classes you can. Subjects like social studies, history, and geography also help you learn about different cultures and people.

Long answer

Many schools only offer popular languages. If you want to learn a language that is very different from English, you might need to look outside of school with your family and join a community group, program, or cultural center.

Middle school 🏫

High school 🎓

6. What are some real-world uses of studying languages (linguistics)?

Short answer

Learning languages can help you make new friends, travel, do business in different places, teach, or even solve crimes.

Long answer

When you learn many languages:

7. How do children use Toki Pona?

This section is new, and we’re still collecting examples to show a better picture of the range of activities! Examples of projects include:


illustrations on this page by jan Alola

↩ Toki Pona FAQ