lesson 1: phonology
New concepts
- the alphabet
- consonants
- vowels
In toki pona, there are fourteen different phonemes (sounds), each represented by one letter. They were carefully selected so that speakers of many languages will know them.
Vowels
toki pona uses five vowels. They are very similar to the vowels in languages like Japanese, Esperanto, and Spanish.
| letter | sounds like | IPA |
|---|---|---|
| a | the a in far | ä |
| i | the ee in seen | i |
| u | the oo in moon | u |
| e | the e in bet | e̞ |
| o | the o in or | o̞ |
Consonants
toki pona uses nine consonants.
The letters k, l, m, n, p, s, t, and w are pronounced the same as in English, and the same way as their IPA symbols.
The letter j is pronounced /j/, like the y in yellow.
Stress
Words are always pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. For example, the word soweli has stress on so, not we or li.
Some speakers stress particles, while others leave them unstressed.
Other notes
In this course, the sounds are defined using the International Phonetic Alphabet and their equivalents in General American English.
Sentences in toki pona start with lowercase letters, not uppercase.
toki pona pronunciation is flexible. You can pronounce letters in ways that differ from the standard pronunciation. For example, some people might pronounce toki pona as [dogi bona]. Because the sounds in toki pona are all common and distinct, this doesn’t create any ambiguity.