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Or, of course, the internet kids could get together and change the world
Jun. 7th, 2025 09:37 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
metafilter_feedToki Pona is the "language of good".
It was created to be easy to learn, easy to speak, and to aid in clear thinking. It has only 120-140 words, and very simple grammar (no tenses, no conjugation, no declension).
Some interesting features of the language: It is spoken by tens of thousands of people around the world and growing quickly. The speakers skew young, with 51% of a 2022 survey respondents being under 20 years old. The community also skews toward LGBT and nonbinary/genderqueer. It can be written in Latin script (using just 14 letters), but also has a nice glyph-based writing system that also aides in learning the vocabulary. The general idea is that a limited vocabulary forces a speaker to consider carefully the nature of the things they wish to speak about. It is necessarily highly context-dependent, and of course so is how we treat many things in our world. For example: to a passenger, an automobile might be "an inside place that moves me on the road", but to a pedestrian it might be "a hard thing that can harm me". Figuring out how to talk about things without giving out individual names to so many of them is often fun and thought-provoking! Toki Pona has been discussed on the blue, previously, but much has changed since then, especially the size of the community, the availability of various media in Toki Pona, and the general notability. E.g. back in 2007 Wikipedia did not consider the language notable enough for an article, and today they have a nice article with nearly 100 references, publications, and external links. So I think it's worth talking about again. The final comment of the prior thread is the title of this one, because I think a lot of the kids on the internet have gotten together over those intervening years, and at least changed aspects of their world.
Some interesting features of the language: It is spoken by tens of thousands of people around the world and growing quickly. The speakers skew young, with 51% of a 2022 survey respondents being under 20 years old. The community also skews toward LGBT and nonbinary/genderqueer. It can be written in Latin script (using just 14 letters), but also has a nice glyph-based writing system that also aides in learning the vocabulary. The general idea is that a limited vocabulary forces a speaker to consider carefully the nature of the things they wish to speak about. It is necessarily highly context-dependent, and of course so is how we treat many things in our world. For example: to a passenger, an automobile might be "an inside place that moves me on the road", but to a pedestrian it might be "a hard thing that can harm me". Figuring out how to talk about things without giving out individual names to so many of them is often fun and thought-provoking! Toki Pona has been discussed on the blue, previously, but much has changed since then, especially the size of the community, the availability of various media in Toki Pona, and the general notability. E.g. back in 2007 Wikipedia did not consider the language notable enough for an article, and today they have a nice article with nearly 100 references, publications, and external links. So I think it's worth talking about again. The final comment of the prior thread is the title of this one, because I think a lot of the kids on the internet have gotten together over those intervening years, and at least changed aspects of their world.
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