I found an asthetic, minimalistic language with only around 130 words in its dictionary, so I decided to learn it. My search for a secret code to write personal notes with is now over. taso jan mi ala li wile kama sona e ona.
Being familiar with Lord of the Rings, and slightly familiar with Star Trek, I’ve been aware of constructed languages (conlangs) for a while, but I never really took the time to explore that corner of the geek realm myself. That changed when a friend and I were talking about languages, and I mentioned to him that some people like to make their own languages. To provide him with examples, I did a quick google search for some of these conlangs, and that’s when I discovered a minimalistic conlang called toki pona.
The main draw for me was that the language was small enough that I could pontentially learn the whole thing in a relatively short amount of time. It only took me a few days to memorize the entire lexicon, and a few weeks to get a hang of the unique grammar system. All this while not even having enough free-time to really focus on it.
Unfortunately, a language with a microscopic lexicon is difficult to use effectively. Saying anything more than the most basic stuff is difficult, and usually takes a few ounces of creativity. For me, that’s the fun part. For others, it may lead to a little frustration. Fortunately, it gets easier after some practice.
As far as the speaking community goes, there’s a few thousand speakers that meet on various discord channels. There are some who make music, some who write articles for the toki pona newspaper, and even some who have their own website on the Indie Web like myself.
Would you learn a language if it only took a few weeks to learn?
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