Permanent Harmonization

Across All Major Publications

In 2025–26, our unified Members will publish or endorse the identical definition of Common Sitelen Pona in all the influential resources that the Toki Pona community relies on:

• Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association
  (this site)

• 
  Toki Pona: The Language of Good
  (2nd English edition)

  • foundational guidebook in the Official Toki Pona series
  • shows direct authorship and endorsement from the original creator of Toki Pona and Sitelen Pona
  • 1st edition published in five languages
  • distributed to tens of thousands of Sitelen Pona readers worldwide
  • bridges all Sitelen Pona characters to their Linku categories, so “updated guidebook words” (nimi pu sin) has equivalent labels in the Linku project even in the future
• Under-ConScript Unicode Registry (UCSUR)
  • encodes writing systems that have not yet been included in Unicode or cannot be included
  • an actively maintained alternative, often used by publishers, typographers, and content creators until Sitelen Pona characters are included in Unicode

• 
  ilo Muni

  • popular tool to research trends in Toki Pona word use from a very large corpus

• 
  lipu Linku

  • popular dictionary maintained by the community
  • clearly marks words:
    • from official books
    • created or proposed by the community
  • conducts annual surveys, where nearly a thousand stakeholders report their language use
  • clearly marks words as:
    • Core and Common (60–100%)
      very popular to universal
    • Uncommon (30–60%)
      somewhat popular
    • Obscure (5–30%)
      “Most speakers don't use or understand obscure words. If you’re a beginner, they will not help you learn the language.”
    • Sandbox (0–5%)
      “proposal not actively in use”

Preliminary Proposal

Our work began as a Preliminary Proposal to Encode Sitelen Pona in the Universal Coded Character Set, which we sent to the Unicode Consortium on April 16, 2024.

• high-resolution PDF (107 MB!)
• low-resolution PDF (14 MB)

This 204-page document curated an abundance of examples illustrating the many ways the growing community of Toki Pona speakers uses Sitelen Pona across physical and digital media, ranging from books, texts, and videos to games and paintings. Many of these works are professional, and many are primarily for cultural enjoyment. The breadth of Toki Pona usage reflected in this large corpus led to the ISO 639-3 standards committee’s decision to review Toki Pona and classify it as a world language under the code tok. This milestone preceded the creation of this proposal.

Page 1 of this 2024 proposal noted: “Research is ongoing and a formal proposal is forthcoming. The information presented here is subject to change.” Since then, regular Sitelen Pona writers have only increased their output of content for readers worldwide. Also, our Association now has a clear unanimous vision for future encoding, which began on October 13, 2024.