This is the allusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, open up language to see a tiny plastic

ballerina turning around and around.

Coming up in today's show is my final linguistic adventure with a fellow radio topin, as

far as this current spate of episodes goes.

On with the show.

There's a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world.

It has around 123 words, 14 letters of the alphabet, and apparently you can become fluent

in it in around 30 hours of study.

It's called Tokipona.

So what Tokipona means, literally good language, or simple language, or like Toki means talk,

or language, or speech, or communication, and Pona means good, or simple, or friendly,

so it's kind of all those ideas in one.

So it's a very positive language.

Positive, simple language, exactly.

Sonya Lang invented Tokipona in 2001.

She's a linguist who grew up in Canada speaking French, English, and the French Canadian

dialects shack.

Then she studied variously Spanish, Latin, German, Finnish, Cantonese, American sign language,

Esperanto, Dutch.

It's not like I intended to make a language, it's just somehow spontaneously.

After learning many different languages, my brain was kind of just trying to, I guess,

restructure itself and understand all these different things that I was learning, and

...