Ten new languages inspired by Toki Pona — brief
411 words. Part of the Conlangs as Tools project, edition v1.2 (2026-09-27).
Drafted by Doruga (Pete’s mobile-companion agent), edited by Peter Kaminski, 2026-05-28.
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© Peter Kaminski · CC-BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)
← Toki Pona deep dive · the brief for the ten · project home · all files (.zip)
Languages: Toki Pona · Taso · Kipona · Ren · Maku · Sito · Olu · Vesi · Korē · Drosa · Hesi
Toki Pona is a small language that does big work. The community has spent twenty-five years living inside its constraint and reporting back on what the constraint teaches. The lessons are not all in the same direction, and some are best illuminated by pushing the dial the other way.
This brief sketches ten new languages. Each is a thought experiment that leans on one specific lesson from Toki Pona — sometimes amplifying it, sometimes inverting it — to keep the inquiry going. They are tools for exploration, not finished proposals. Read them as design provocations.
Each language has its own file in languages/. Each profile contains:
- What it explores — the Toki Pona lesson it builds on or inverts.
- Profile — the mechanic, the philosophy, how it would feel to use.
- Examples — sample lexicon and short utterances.
- Future action research — concrete experiments that could be run.
The ten
| # | Name | Lever | Lesson from Toki Pona |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Taso | absence | TP foregrounds presence; what about explicit absence? |
| 02 | Kipona | time anchoring | TP shrugs at tense; invert — anchor every utterance. |
| 03 | Ren | verbs over nouns | TP allows fluid POS; push to relation-only. |
| 04 | Maku | human-machine bridge | TP compounds; pair with structured machine parsing. |
| 05 | Sito | gesture-primary | sitelen pona shows visual viability; go bodily. |
| 06 | Olu | bounded growth | TP capped itself; release the cap one word at a time. |
| 07 | Vesi | thick polysemy | TP polysemy is informal; canonize and densify it. |
| 08 | Korē | affective grounding | TP is embodied; root entirely in inner state. |
| 09 | Drosa | mandatory evidentiality | TP doesn’t source claims; demand it always. |
| 10 | Hesi | silence-first | TP slows speech; treat speech as the exception. |
Spread across the disciplines
- Psychology / phenomenology — Taso, Korē, Hesi
- Linguistics & grammar — Kipona, Ren, Vesi
- Sociolinguistics & history — Olu (cohort transmission), Drosa (epistemic norms)
- HCI / human-machine — Maku
- Embodiment & multimodal — Sito
The set is intentionally varied. None of them is “Toki Pona again, smaller.” Each one keeps a different dial, and each one would teach a different lesson about what language is for.
← Back to the Toki Pona deep dive · Start the ten with Taso →