↩ Toki Pona FAQ

Meet Madame Lang and her work 👩🏻‍💻

Follow or contact Madame Lang

When kids and little ones discover Toki Pona 👧🏽

Madame Lang often receives messages from:

See Toki Pona for Kids for an example of a reply sent by Madame Lang.

Toki Pona’s origins and organic growth ✨️

In response to those who perceive Toki Pona as a threat to Esperanto’s reputation as “an easy constructed language for international communication”, let’s clarify how the project began. Madame Lang never intended Toki Pona to compete with other conlangs. As a teenager she explored the features of a wide range of world languages, including Esperanto, whose community she still supports through extensive volunteer work.

Then, during a difficult period in her early 20s, she experienced a flash of creative inspiration or sudden intuition. This is hard to put in words, but something compelled her to quickly write down most of the design for Toki Pona as it took shape in her mind. Maybe her subconscious was remapping itself according to various patterns it had seen in dozens of languages while also adding many new ideas of its own. This began purely as a personal art project or a form of creative therapy and inner exploration, not as a proposal for a world language.

Over time and much to her surprise, tens of thousands of people around the globe discovered Toki Pona during the many years when she was absent from the Toki Pona community. New waves of speakers embraced its universal applications, particularly young learners, who gravitate toward its concise expressive style and speak Toki Pona in all sorts of real-world situations that weren’t imagined in 2001. After the ISO 639-3 standards committee reviewed Toki Pona and classified it as a world language, we have a duty to inform the public about the state of Toki Pona in 2025. Descriptions of Toki Pona from the 2000s are interesting to learn about its origins, but they don’t accurately represent how widely Toki Pona is used in the world today.

This is also why sometimes Madame Lang may seem to speak Esperanto more often than Toki Pona.

What can I call Madame Lang? 🗨

Pronouns, head nouns and titles depend on the grammar and conventions of each language and culture. It’s safer to be polite and have good manners with each other.

Is Toki Pona free? 🎁

Toki Pona as a language and idea 🕊️

Toki Pona is free and open to everyone: it belongs to all of humanity. In that sense, Madame Lang shares the same view as Dr. Zamenhof. There are plenty of high-quality free courses made by the community. For example, lipu sona pona is available in many languages.

Official works by Madame Lang 📘

That said, specific published works are a separate matter. Madame Lang is an indie creator and author, and she earns a living by producing and publishing books in the Official Toki Pona series. Even though these works are protected by copyright, she often releases many chapters and pages into the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. This enables the Toki Pona community to consult, share, reuse, and even modify those sections freely. For example, the reference dictionary from the first guidebook is completely free.

Ever since the German edition of that book, the sitelen pona writing system went from being under Creative Commons to entering fully in the public domain. That means people have been free for years now to use it commercially without having to mention her name.

Regarding her second book (the thick dictionary), all the most common and important parts are freely available and can be found in three text files. Only the thousands of very specific examples need to be looked up in the actual book.

Independent remixes and forks ✊

There are also independent Toki Pona publishers and Toki Pona merch sellers who do well. Anyone can use the words “Toki Pona” and the Toki Pona logo (the smiley face with three rays) for purposes related to the language and its community, even commercially.

Madame Lang’s only request is that you identify yourself in a way that makes it clear that you’re not Official Toki Pona or Sonja Lang. To show everyone that you’re someone else, ensure your username, project title, and account branding don’t imitate one of hers too closely. This is just to avoid confusion for the public and for readers. Make the specific name, appearance, and nature of your organization, publication, service, or content distinctive enough from other existing ones. For that reason, you can find books under different labels: Official Toki Pona by Sonja Lang, Toki Pona Stories by Aaron Fingtam, Cœur moelleux de Toki Pona by Jean-Marc Quéré, Learning Language: Toki Pona by Kurt Hinton, and so on. As another example, the toki-pona account name on Tumblr clarifies: “just a Toki Pona speaker, not the official Toki Pona account. see @sonjalang”.

Volunteer work 🙋‍♀️

Madame Lang also spends many of her office hours volunteering. Along with other experienced teachers, she helps teach Toki Pona on public servers (mainly on Discord), patiently guiding newcomers. She supports many advanced speakers with their various projects, and she replies to frequent questions and emails from journalists and media professionals without charging a fee.

So what does Official Toki Pona mean? 👩‍🎨

A certain source ⛲

The word official is a convention used by many artists. For example, if you see a YouTube video labelled as “official”, it implies the content was uploaded or authorized by the actual artist and isn’t a fan upload or third-party re-post. It’s the version recognized by whoever originally created it.

Official Toki Pona is just a way to identify that Madame Lang, the main creator of Toki Pona and Sitelen Pona, genuinely authored a particular book, website, social media account, or similar thing. If any part of it was by someone else, it means she wanted to publish it with their permission to show her endorsement. Thus, Official Toki Pona indicates a particular source. It has nothing to do with commands, obedience, or a mandatory way of speaking Toki Pona.

Sound starting point ✅

Unlike some conlangs, Toki Pona speakers don’t consider Official Toki Pona books to be the only mandatory and unchangeable source. Not everyone is naturally book-oriented, and there are other great ways to learn and useful tools out there (as well as mediocre resources unfortunately). But generally, the books made by the language creator can be treated as reliable or useful guides and sound starting points.

They’ve been distributed worldwide in tens of thousands of copies since 2014. Realistically, the books will continue to generate and nurture new waves of speakers for a long time. Most of these speakers won’t keep up with the latest trendy Toki Pona server on Discord where a really interesting new idea or creative style sometimes emerges and later has the potential to gradually become mainstream enough to eventually get mentioned in a book or somewhere similar.

The information and styles taught in Official Toki Pona books are based on the decades of knowledge, observations, and informed opinions of the longest serving Toki Pona teacher, who also speaks and has taught many other languages in a professional setting. She has seen a lot of what the Toki Pona and Esperanto communities have already tried in the past, and what the general outcome was. Everyone who speaks Toki Pona today learned it from someone, who learned it from someone (and so on), who ultimately learned it from the person who designed the language.

Madame Lang surrounds herself with other experienced and large-scale Toki Pona researchers, teachers, and publishers, so she can often get their feedback and comparen’tes with them. While the speaking community is too large to know everyone and speak with everyone, she is active enough in a mix of Toki Pona communities to be aware of small linguistic changes and newer opinions that can naturally develop over time. As a result, many official books come with minor updates and errata you can read. they’re compiled when enough time has passed to notice what has really changed slightly, and what was just a short-term fad in one server.

Never prescriptive or mandatory 👮

All resources labelled as official or Official Toki Pona are never prescriptive: they don’t tell you what you must or must not do. It’s very widely known (and repeated in the books) that they’re guidelines that serve as perennial seeds to inspire knowledge and creativity. Their intended use is never as strict laws or walls to control or limit speakers. Learning or using a style based on pu, ku, and/or su is completely voluntary. We’re sceptical of new fan forks and remixes that style themselves as the “modern gospel” or lawa suli, repeating the same error that Lesson 19 warned about.

On a practical level, knowing the O.G. style described by the Lang-community teams in Official Toki Pona sources or using it as a starting point can provide a stable, well-documented, and well-understood “central option” that anyone can fall back on. (The same cound be said about any remix that copied the O.G. style with their own additions, omissions, changes.) Understanding the stable source can help when you talk to someone you don’t know very well, especially if one of you might have a more diverging or innovative style. Such small differences of style can stem from a speaker’s own preferences and also from the peer influences of whatever subgroup of Toki Pona friends they spend the most time with. As you get to know someone a bit better, it’s much easier to understand any minor quirks their style might have.

The words “canon” and “standard” 📚

Increasingly, we can read false or misleading quotations online of things Madame Lang never said. The word canon can be helpful to mean “the works of a writer that have been accepted as authentically by them”. However, the word “canon” has too many other meanings that are unsuitable for Toki Pona, such as “a religious code of laws” (we’re not a religion!) and “material considered to be part of a fictional universe” (Toki Pona is spoken by real people!), so it’s not recommended.

The word standard is normally translated in Toki Pona as nasin pi jan mute (the style of many or most people) or nasin kulupu (the common style, the community’s style). The idea of “standard” applies not only to Official Toki Pona books but also to many other new resources created by the community that make often-accurate efforts to describe mainstream usage and random fan trends in certain subcommunities. Some common features of the language may not be explicitly mentioned in previous official books and are logical and popular extensions. For example, comparisons were not formally taught in the 2014 edition of lipu pu, but it’s easy to use ijo la (in the context of a thing) and mute (more) as already defined in that book. Of course, other popular ways to build comparisons exist.

Community-created resources 🌱

Official resources are never the only valid or reliable ones! There are many community-created learning resources and useful tools! Most are even free. Madame Lang specializes in producing written text, adding illustrations made by friends. Others specialize in producing reinterpretations of Toki Pona, videos, audio content, games, fonts, and great things in other formats.

However, please be careful! Unfortunately, poor-quality works also exist and can be found online.

Conclusion 🚩

The full range of every possible diverse style of Toki Pona and Sitelen Pona is always valid! (As a result, unless it’s already a classroom setting, we should always ask for consent first before providing a grammar correction that the other person never requested.) We can say something like: This is according to the pu, ku, and/or su style(s). Or we can say that a particular document or person follows such and such a style as defined somewhere by someone. For example, Toki Pona magazines typically have their own conventions to keep things consistent.

Lower-quality Toki Pona resources 🤦‍♀️

Because Toki Pona is freely accessible, anyone can create materials in or about the language. While there are many excellent learning resources and other resources created by the community, there are also quite a few easy-to-find materials that contain misunderstandings or significant errors. In some cases, they may have been made quickly to earn money, but more often, the creators had good intentions. They might be less active in the broader community of fluent speakers who use Toki Pona in advanced conversations every day. Because the content creator hasn’t had a chance to receive regular feedback from very experienced and active speakers over a long enough period of time, they can easily overestimate their skill level or familiarity with Toki Pona compared to the people around them who don’t speak it at all.

Someone might think, “Toki Pona is a small and new conlang with flexibility. I only started learning it recently, and I might even be considered intermediate. So now I can share my own interpretation with the world. Who would know the difference?” However, these attempts can inadvertently spread very confusing information. This is comparable to releasing an app or textbook to teach French based on your partial understanding after only a brief or intermediate period of study.

When beginners find these kinds of resources, it’s hard for them to spot the quality issues. They may spend time learning from them and become confused, then reach out to a Toki Pona learning server for help. More experienced teachers often recognize the errors right away and may advise learners to set those materials aside.

Members of the Toki Pona community regularly try to contact these content creators to kindly explain the situation, but some are anonymous or difficult to reach. The hope is that authors will withdraw their works until they’ve gained enough proficiency and can update them to a basic teaching standard. They can also collaborate with a Toki Pona translator or proofreader, whose help can involve many hours of skilled labour. Such help might be voluntary or could come at a standard professional rate.

Despite these efforts, it can feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole as new resources keep appearing or older works resurface. Sometimes, people even mistake an outdated PDF for a pirated digital copy of an official Toki Pona book, not realizing it was created by someone else and includes errors.

Creative works are a different thing, of course. If someone publishes experimental poetry or shares a story that uses an odd new word, that’s not the same as releasing a work that publicly presents itself as a way to learn Toki Pona.

Why am I being invited to provide feedback or expertise? 💡

Although not prescriptive, Madame Lang’s Toki Pona resources are very widely distributed and naturally come up in discussions about the conlang. While we also emphasize the great learning resources and other tools made by the community, new waves of beginners continue to rely on Madame Lang’s works as a sound starting point. She has a duty to keep them as accurate and responsive as possible. We must also prevent them from being misinterpreted or misused. Therefore, the team that helps Madame Lang with her work welcomes all kinds of feedback, even those that publicly challenge Madame Lang’s work. Your valuable ideas and viewpoints truly help our conlang and its communities grow and improve.

By asking for your specific constructive input and giving you a seat at the table, the team wants to make sure you have an equal voice in shaping the future of all the conlangs we love. When we work together to refine, improve, and update official books, this website, and other conlang resources, we want everyone’s ideas to matter. Although there may not always be ways to incorporate every single request or solve every problem, we must always do our best to consider all perspectives and make changes in the right direction so materials remain helpful and accurate for everyone.

You might think, “But I haven’t complained about anything.” We’re also here to address concerns raised by other people! In that light, we’d love your insights to help find better solutions together. This is why we’re consulting you. Your expertise can make a real difference in refining descriptions of the language that are widely distributed and that many rely upon. If this ever becomes too much work for you, please send us a link to your Ko-fi, an invoice for your services, or nominate a different expert, or ask us to stop after you’re fully satisfied.

After we’ve heard everyone out and made any changes that seem possible and right, we hope you’ll feel satisfied, knowing that you played and continue to play a key role in shaping the final outcome. Our goal is to keep things moving forward in a way that respects and includes everyone.

Alternatives to Amazon 🛒

Question: I don’t like Amazon for a number of valid reasons. What are my options?

Good news: As of February 2025, Madame Lang is in the process of adding her books to books.by/tokipona. There are some formatting hurdles, but eventually she hopes to distribute all her books on both Amazon and books.by/tokipona.

This distribution channel completely bypasses Amazon and also ensures a higher percentage of your money goes to support her as a small indie publisher.

Why does the inventor sometimes respond in other languages? đŸ§˜â€â™€ď¸

Toki Pona began as a deeply personal and spiritual endeavour during a difficult period in its creator’s life. Madame Lang has even described it as if something beyond her own conscious choice or control compelled her to write down the design. Because Toki Pona carries such strong emotional meaning for her, she needs to be in a particular state of mind to use it in a positive and appropriate way. Sometimes that only happens when she’s alone.

Although she understands everything said to her in Toki Pona, she may occasionally respond in another language like French, English, Esperanto, German, or Malay–Indonesian. She learned those languages in normal ways, so they don’t have the same emotional reverberation on her. Her choice of language simply reflects how she’s feeling at the moment, rather than any lack of love or dedication for Toki Pona.

It’s important to note that Toki Pona has grown far beyond its original purpose. Thousands of speakers now use it socially, for everyday communication, creative projects, collaborations, and all sorts of situations. You’re always welcome to speak to Madame Lang in Toki Pona, and she’ll always be happy to follow along! If she replies in another language, don’t be discouraged, confused, or offended. She’s still deeply connected to Toki Pona.

Community bans 🚷

Question: I got banned from an online Toki Pona community. Isn’t that unfair or wrong or against free speech in some countries? What should I do?

Answer: Toki Pona is very decentralized and youth-driven. Every community has its own rules, enforcement practices, and organizing teams (kulupu lawa). The administrators and moderators are all volunteers, whom we should thank and be kind to! Bans usually happen when someone breaks the rules or disturbed a lot of community members, who then send complaints to the moderators and ask them to take action.

Typical patterns: The most common cases usually revolve around repeated harmful speech about issues of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, plurality, neurodiversity, politics, or culture war topics. Sometimes people make others uncomfortable with repeated public displays of affection or excessive sexual talk, after others ask them to reduce them or take them to private messages. Sometimes a beginner will try to pull all the teachers into repeated hypothetical debates about the beginner’s proposed changes to Toki Pona and not show any interest in learning the basics of the language as it already exists and is used by thousands. (See extending Toki Pona for a more successful approach to work with the community and not against it.)

General advice: In normal human interactions between people from all over the world and from different lived experiences, such incidents of minor miscommunication can happen by mistake without any bad intentions! After people tell you they see a problem, you can easily demonstrate good faith: Don’t stubbornly double down with more determination and repeated behaviour. Be humble, dialogue with others in mutual consultation, and show a reasonable small effort to learn about the affected or harmed group. (This advice also goes a long way in helping you succeed in life in general, not just in Toki Pona communities.) If you think you might have controversial or more extreme views and want to avoid any problems, you always have the right to keep such topics to yourself and focus on the actual purpose of the communities, which is to learn and use the Toki Pona language. If you want to promote an alternative and smaller Toki Pona community, you can usually do this in a healthy way without attacking specific larger communities or their mods in the process, and without promoting communities where such negativity commonly takes place. Toki Pona is about positive communication! Before you share links, just check the community’s policy on self-promotion first.

Banned people sometimes try to get help from Madame Lang, but her role is as the language creator, book author, volunteer teacher, and general community friend. She has to forward such requests to the relevant kulupu lawa. Madame Lang doesn’t interfere in how most communities organize themselves.

How to get unbanned: If you think there was a mod error, or the situation and your views have truly changed, you can usually appeal and request to be unbanned. If enough time has passed, the mods might even be different people who can give your case a truly fresh eye. Be transparent, honest, and constructive.

Is Madame Lang a linguist? 👩‍🏫

Misconception: Sonja Lang is a university-trained specialist in linguistics.

Clarification: Madame Lang is a linguist in the first dictionary definition: ‘a person who speaks several languages fluently’. She doesn’t have an academic diploma in linguistics or a university job. She is a self-taught hyperpolyglot (7+ languages). In a paid capacity, she has worked many years as a translator, conference interpreter, teacher, and now a publisher of language books. She has carried out independent work to study languages, e.g. descriptive Toki Pona publications and Singaporean Malay corpus research. If the word ‘linguist’ isn’t a good summary or is misleading, then maybe say language inventor, language professional, or polyglot.


↩ Toki Pona FAQ