Tokiponidos and my attempts at making sense of them

Introduction to tokiponidos

Tokidopido?

A tokiponido (formed with Esperanto -ido "offspring", cf. esperantido, rhymes with knee dough) is a constructed language that is in some way based on Toki Pona, itself a conlang that was first shared online in 2001 by Sonja Lang. As a language both of creativity and of the digital age, Toki Pona inspires many people across the web to make many sorts of things. Beside creating things in TP, some take inspiration from it when they construct languages of their own. How exactly they do that varies from conlang to conlang.

Because of that, it’s hard to say what exactly should count as a tokiponido and what shouldn’t. Is it a changed form of standard Toki Pona, with only a few nonstandard words and constructions? Is it a language that was evolved from Toki Pona, with changes made to the sounds, words, rules…? Suppose it didn’t resemble Toki Pona at all, but its creator had some knowledge of it and was inspired to add a few similar features, consciously or not? There’s a lot of places where one could draw the line, and you can probably find someone using the word in each of these ways. Still, even in Toki Pona circles the term “tokiponido” is uncommon and not universally understood (understandably so, since it's not a Toki Pona word).

Why is this a thing?

People invent languages for a variety of reasons. But why tokiponidos in particular? I'll admit it isn't exactly the pinnacle of originality, it can feel pretty derivative sometimes. An explanation many people arrive at is that some folks didn't like or get Toki Pona, and thought it needed fixing. This does play a role sometimes (see Mini (2020), Tipunsin (2020)). Most of the time, the attitude is more positive: when people make something they like, it can resemble Toki Pona simply because Toki Pona is also a thing they like.

Personally, I got into tokiponidoing because I was having trouble conlanging - or rather, trouble starting from scratch and not giving up halfway through. By building off a preëxisting base like TP's, I found it easier to regularly occupy myself with conlanging in general and with Toki Pona in particular, at a time when I struggled with both. To me, tokiponidos are an accessible entry point to the bigger world of conlanging, and fun in their own right. Here's a few examples:

A few examples:

Sometimes, the name of a language tells you a lot about its resemblance to Toki Pona. Languages with Toki Pona words in the name, like luka pona and toki ma, are often very similar:

• Luka Pona Sign Language was started by jan Olipija in 2020, in accordance with the philosophy of Toki Pona; it is used within the Toki Pona community.
• Toki Ma (2020) was another offshoot, intended as an international auxiliary language. It was created by Shevek Urrasti as a community-effort, one that would eventually go on without him (from what I understand). In 2023, Toki Ma was thoroughly reworked and rebaptised to Kokanu. As the new name suggests, it has a very different relation to TP now (although it still has a similar analytic grammar, shares a significant part of its community, uses a blue-yellow logo, etc.)
• Tuki Tiki (2020) is my language. Under a layer of sound (and meaning) changes, the name corresponds to toki sike or "circular/repetitive language". It's Toki Pona but smaller: there are only 8 sounds and 39 words, of which my favourites are l and li respectively. Though I only use it for my own amusement, I've heard from a few people with special needs that it helps them in certain situations (e.g. to read, write and/or sign with a smaller set of word symbols to remember).
• Even more obviously, jan Mato’s Speak Good (2010) just replaces each nimi pi toki pona with an English word. There are many such cases where each word from Toki Pona is replaced with a new one, i.e. where Toki Pona is relexified.

A conlang’s name is one way the creator can tell people they were inspired by TP. Another way to tell them is, well, to actually just tell them:

• Lilipu (2002) by Victor Medrano: "I was exposed to Sonja [Lang]'s fantastic creation of Toki Pona, a conlang which encapsulated "small is beautiful" with its simple pidgin-like grammar and reduced vocabulary. Lilipu was my answer, a language for creating haiku poetry."
• Jaobon (2014) by u/qzorum: "Jaobon is in large part inspired by, and in response to, Toki Pona; it shares many similarities but also a few key philosophical differences: more roots, shorter roots, and an explicitly prescribed dictionary of root collocations to express more complex concepts."
• Ancish (2023) by cartweel: "The pitch is this: toki pona but make it Old English."

A few more, slightly less typical, examples:

There are times when a conlang’s name is deceptive. For example: there’s a language out there called Sitelen Pona, a written-only language that’s meant to be convertable to any spoken language in the world. As such, it’s based more on a Western understanding of Chinese writing than on Toki Pona. It also bears little to no resemblance to Toki Pona's writing system (also called sitelen pona). For lack of a single native pronounceable name, the author picked one out from another conlang with its own logography… I guess he liked the sound? The implied relation to TP doesn’t amount to anything when I look closer; I don’t consider this a tpido.

Conversely, someone can publish a suspiciously Toki Pona shaped language without mentioning Toki Pona at all. Such is the case of Jackson Moore’s musical language Moss/Maas. His 2009 description sounds a lot like (early) descriptions of Toki Pona: for one, Moss “has just 120 words and a few grammatical rules of thumb”. Moore also called it a “pidgin language”, while Sonja called Toki Pona a “pidgin-like language” in 2001 (this disappeared quite quickly from the website and is no longer said by people today). It would be a stunning coincidence if this didn’t have to do with Toki Pona. Either way, it’s not at all a rip-off but a valuable work of art in its own right! You can listen to some Moss performances, or conversations, on Jackson Moore's FreeMusicArchive page. Milamber made a great comparison of Maas & TP in her video about Toki Kalama (which, like Sitelen Pona, picked a name from Toki Pona because it has no spoken name in itself).

So that's one group of edge cases: the middle ground between "tokiponido" and "regular conlang". I see these two categories as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Ditto for edge cases between "tokiponido" and straightup Toki Pona:

• Toki Pona enhanced (2014) is barely different from normal Toki Pona, but has at least one (1) quirk. This isn't so much a conlang, or a conlect, as it is a funky grammatical analysis à la .lojban. (and I respect it for that). It does call itself a "dialect".
• Toki Wawa (2020) is an expansion of Toki Pona: it has more words and other such things as languages tend to have. The creator, firaro, says it's "not a separate language". Which is probably true, but I mean, it is a different project by different people who wanted to do something different from vanilla Toki Pona, and that makes it relevant to me as an avid tokiponidist. When tokiponidos come up, so do expanded forms of Toki Pona. When conlangs come up, so do restricted forms of natural languages: Wikipedia mentions Basic English and its parody Newspeak as constructed languages. There, too, lies a fuzzy between-zone.
• I mentioned Speak Good above already, but there's a lot more TP relexes out there. Some of them replace each TP word with a word from another language, like God Snakke (2021), or from several languages, like the collaborative Susu Sen (2024). Kornlang (2017) has 240 sounds, so each of the 120 pu words can be pronounced as a consonant or a vowel in alternation. Other folks don't mess with words directly, but map each Toki Pona phoneme onto a new phoneme, or... "boneme", in u/Staetyk's Skeleton Tokiponido (2024). A large chunk of Toki Pona relexes are signed relexes, like TPSL (2013), Toki Pona Luka (2014) etc. All of these could be thought of more as coded forms of TP than as their own systems of communication.

(conlangs that aren't totally languages)

The me section

I became interested in tokiponidos in 2020, the same year I started Tuki Tiki. In the summer, a TP community member called Robbie (jan Wapi) made a YouTube video rating different tokiponidos, following similar content about esperantidos. I remember being surprised that something I had “made” got any amount of attention online – I mean, all I’d done was share a Google Spreadsheets link in a couple Discord servers. Turns out Tuki Tiki would become one of the most well-known tokiponidos among Toki Pona Folk, along with Luka Pona and Kokanu (Toki Ma).

here is a link to my tokiponido spreadsheet