Toki Pona glyphs ready for future Unicode adoption and feature film

Director Fredric King, language inventor Sonja Lang and TikToker Vivian Jenna Wilson collab on The Drummer from Another Planet

TANJUNG PENAGA, PULAU PINANG, MALAYSIA, January 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Tawhid Press, publisher of the Official Toki Pona series, endorses Common Sitelen Pona (sitelen pona kulupu) as the permanent standard to write, encode and display text in the Toki Pona language across all platforms. This equips the Unicode Consortium with everything needed to begin implementing the long-awaited support of Sitelen Pona. “This will allow both hobbyist and professional users to interchange text in the Sitelen Pona script until […] it is deemed stable and ready for inclusion in […] Unicode,” confirmed Rebecca Bettencourt, Acting President of the Sitelen Pona Publishers and Typographers Association.

Award-winning film director and producer Fredric King commented: “Sitelen Pona isn’t just a stylistic choice, it’s part of Toki Pona’s DNA. The living language and its authentic writing system have brought new life and wonder to our feature film: The Drummer from Another Planet. Collaborating with Madame Lang and her team, including Vivian Jenna Wilson, has opened a space of creative discovery and cultural understanding. I’m genuinely happy to be part of the fun.” Madame Lang added: “mi pilin pona tan ni: 2026 is the year of Sitelen Pona.”

Today, Toki Pona is the second most popular constructed language. ISO 639-3 categorized Toki Pona in the world region due to its substantial and growing text corpus and its vigorous user community. For over a decade, its writing system, Sitelen Pona, has been fundamental to countless cultural projects, with a current 85% literacy rate. Prior to 2026, content creators, producers, writers, publishers and software developers would resort to incompatible ad hoc workarounds, forced to save text as images, to customize fonts, to rely on volunteers coordinating Private Use Areas, or to shoehorn romanizations. This patchwork has posed serious barriers to consistency, accessibility, data interoperability and team productivity, amassing a backlog for digital librarians, corpus linguists, programmers and producers to consolidate.

Timeline:

- 2001: Toki Pona invented, symbol later to be revealed as toki (language) combined with pona (good)
- May 25, 2014: Sitelen Pona published in Toki Pona: The Language of Good
- April 16, 2024: Preliminary Proposal to Encode Sitelen Pona in the Universal Coded Character Set (204 pages of proof)
- January 17, 2026: Common Sitelen Pona released by sitelenpona.org!
- Beginning in 2026, as feasible: The Unicode Consortium can fully support and implement Common Sitelen Pona according to their timeline and standards.
- After the the Unicode Consortium’s work: Institutions and organizations can begin preserving or formatting the library of over one thousand documents, videos, games, and more.

Amat al-Malik
Tawhid Press
amatalmalik@tokipona.org
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Vivian Jenna Wilson introduces Sonja Lang

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