Sitelen Pona , also known as Toki Pona hieroglyphs, is a constructed logography used for Toki Pona. It was originally designed circa 2013 and published in 2014 by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang, the language's creator.
History Sitelen Pona was designed by Lang in preparation for her upcoming Toki Pona textbook release. In 2013, she published a page listing 20 characters as a sample of the book's contents. The book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, was published in 2014, and it included the first full description of Sitelen Pona in a dedicated section. In 2021, Lang declared Sitelen Pona public domain. In 2024, Lang published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona edition), the first in the su series of illustrated storybooks aimed at beginners, in which all Toki Pona text is written in sitelen pona. This was the first published book that used sitelen pona as a primary script. In 2025, around twenty members, including Lang, founded the Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association to represent the interests of publishers and fontmakers who use the script. The association also collaborated with other groups, including the Unicode Consortium, for the script's technical standardization. In 2026, the Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association released the Common Sitelen Pona standard , which defines a set of common-use characters and various methods of encoding them for fonts.
Overview Sitelen Pona is typically written left-to-right, top-to-bottom. As a logography, each word is written with a single grapheme. Many of the characters are derived from translingual and universal symbols such as pictograms, road signs, mathematical symbols, and emoticons. They have been described as "mostly easy to recognize, quick to remember and simple enough that even a child could draw them." A head followed by a single modifier (e.g. a noun followed by an adjective) may be combined into one character by stacking the modifier grapheme above the head grapheme, or by nesting the modifier grapheme inside the head grapheme if there is space. The symbol of the language – – is written this way, with the grapheme (pona) nested inside the grapheme (toki).
Names
Names are written by enclosing multiple characters in a cartouche shaped like a rounded rectangle. Each character inside represents the first phoneme (or, equivalently, letter) of its word. The specific characters used in a name may be chosen creatively to convey meaning about its subject. In an alternative system called nasin sitelen kalama, characters inside a cartouche can be followed by interpuncts or dots, where each interpunct represents the next mora of the word, and a colon represents all morae of the word.
Punctuation
Sitelen Pona punctuation is unstandardized and thus highly variable, as The Language of Good features only the cartouche. As a result, some texts use no punctuation at all, instead relying on formatting and context. Sentence boundaries are typically marked with an interpunct, period, line break, or a wide space. Question marks and exclamation marks are often proscribed due to their similarity to the characters for the words seme () and o () or a (), respectively. Where quotation marks are used, CJK-style corner brackets (「...」) and double high quotation marks (“...” or "...") are most common.
Characters The original English edition of Lang's book Toki Pona: The Language of Good introduces 120 logographic characters, one for each of the core words taught in the book.
The 2022 Esperanto edition of the same book (Tokipono: La lingvo de bono) includes alternative ways to write three words.
The same edition presents characters for the 17 additional words spotlighted as "essential" in Toki Pona Dictionary (nimi ku suli). According to the accompanying text, these were the most commonly used characters for those words as of 2022, but there were still disagreements in the speaking community, and the following characters might be subject to change based on future community consensus.
Notes:
Encoding
As of June 2026, Sitelen Pona has not been encoded into Unicode. It is included in the unofficial Under-ConScript Unicode Registry since 2022, at the Private Use Area codepoints range U+F1900–U+F19FF.
References
Publications Lang, Sonja (2014). Toki Pona: The Language of Good. Tawhid. ISBN 978-0978292300. OCLC 921253340. Lang, Sonja; Strake, Julius (2021). Toki Pona: Die Sprache des Guten (in German). ISBN 979-8770755251. Lang, Sonja (2024). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona ed.). Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp. ISBN 978-0-9782923-7-9.
External links
Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association Chapter on Sitelen Pona in Toki Pona: The Language of Good via lipu pi jan Ne lipu Linku, an online Toki Pona dictionary that lists Sitelen Pona characters, including characters for uncommon words and common alternative ways to write a word
