Q: does Toki Pona pronunciation vary among different speakers?

tl;dr: There is some variation, but it’s fairly small. If you’re just casually learning, just mimic the audio you find throughout the beginners course!

If you like the study of sounds in languages, and can read the IPA, this page is for you!

There are some small differences in pronunciation between different Toki Pona speakers. Voicing, aspiration, and several other differences listed below do not make a meaningful difference in Toki Pona, but some pronunciations are more common than others.

There are two main sources for sound variation in Toki Pona: the influence of your native language, and personal preference.

Native language influence

Most Toki Pona speakers can speak English, and many also speak Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Russian, etc. These languages’ sound systems are different from Toki Pona, which may influence a learner to speak slightly differently than most. As learners become more skilled, they usually adapt to a more common, neutral pronunciation.

Aspiration is a puff of air that can come after a consonant. In Toki Pona, /p t k/ are typically unaspirated. English-speaking learners often aspirate them, because they are aspirated [pʰ tʰ kʰ] in English.

In French, ⟨s⟩ is usually voiced [z] between vowels, so French speakers sometimes pronounce words like ‘musi’ as [muzi].

In languages like German, Russian, Hungarian, etc, there is no /w/ sound, but there is a /v/ sound, which is very similar. Speakers of those languages can sometimes be heard pronouncing ‘tawa’ like [tava].

Japanese doesn’t have /l/, but it has /ɾ/, which is similar. You’ll often hear [ɾiɾi] for ‘lili’ a lot in vocal synth songs, because they use technology originally created for Japanese.

In Russian, there are two L-sounds: ⟨л⟩ /ɫ/ and ⟨ль⟩ /lʲ/. They are called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, or ‘velarised’ and ‘palatalised’. Toki Pona /l/ is a more neutral sound, in between the two extremes. Because of this, a Russian learner might pronounce words like ‘len’ either too ‘dark’ or too ‘soft’.

In English, vowels /ɛ/ (like in ‘dress’) and /ɔ/ (like in ‘cloth’) cannot appear at the end of a word, but vowels /ɛj/ (like in ‘stay’) and /əw/ (like in ‘know’) can. This causes many English-speaking learners of Toki Pona to pronounce vowels with a bit of an offglide: [ikej], [wasow].

Personal preference

Some small variation is mostly due to personal preference. Other speakers will likely not even notice unless they’re trying!

Some pronounce /t/ like [t], others like [t̪]. Both are good. If you don’t know what the difference is, that’s a good sign it doesn’t matter!

Most speakers assimilate /n/ + consonant sequences, which means /n/ starts to sound more like the consonant that comes next. English does it with ⟨nk⟩ [ŋk], but in Toki Pona you’ll also hear /np/ [mp] all the time.

But this usually happens inside a word, like anpa, Sonko, linja. A minority of speakers (including me, kala Asi) also assimilate between words: they pronounce ken pona, ken kama like kem pona, keŋ kama.

Words that start with a vowel are also interesting. Because words can start with a vowel, you can have several vowels in a row in Toki Pona: mi sona e ona. Most speakers will just gradually transition from one vowel to the next. Some will start the word with a glottal stop [ʔ] to break up the vowels. Sometimes, especially from singers, you might hear words start with a [h].