Use Toki Pona, and ‘Ale li pona’ (everything will be OK)

“Ale li pona,” she told herself. “Everything will be OK.”

Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her little language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.

It’s all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of JRR Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.

The website Langm-aker.com lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from ‘Ayvárith to Zyem.

The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do — “conlang,” short for constructed languages.

The awareness of invented languages has been driven in part by their use in popular films, such as Ku, a fictional “African” language spoken by Nicole Kidman in the 2005 film The Interpreter.

Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists like Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.

Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary that is necessary to communicate.

With only 120 words, a Toki Pona speaker must combine words to express more complicated ideas. For example, the Toki Pona phrase for “friend” is jan pona (the “j” sounds like a “y”), literally “good person.” Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona’s vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.

“It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it,” Kisa said.

Tolkien liked to call invented language his “secret vice.” He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.

People have been inventing languages since at least the 12th century, when the nun Hildegard of Bingen developed a rudimentary conlang she called Lingua Ignota, Latin for “unknown language.”

Since Kisa let Toki Pona loose on the Internet in 2001, it has spread from Toronto to speakers all over the world.

“Tenpo ni la toki pona li kama suli. Jan mute li kepeken e ona,” she said.”It’s like a living thing now.”