WHY I LIKE MINIMALISTIC LANGUAGES

July 3, 2026 - Published

A while ago, I brought up toki pona (a constructed language with only about 130 words) to some non-conlanger friends. To my disappointment, they were not fans! They were able to very quickly and easily give reasons for why they didn't like such a concept, but to my surprise, it was me that wasn't able to formulate the exact reason I liked them!

It's clearly something that's stuck with me for a long time -- the very first idea I had for a constructed language, even before I knew the term for constructed languages, was ultimately a minimalistic language. I'll be exploring reasons that I most likely enjoy minimalistic languages on a personal level, without talking about things like how I imagine them to be ideal for a potential auxlang.

#1 - Minimalistic design is satisfying to me!

This should not be a surprise to anyone who's seen any of my other works!

DracoFighter is a minimalistic fighting game. I enjoy and create animations with limited framerates. My character designs also tend to feature very limited palettes without excessive detail.

This is because, ultimately, I enjoy minimalistic design a lot! Minimalism has gotten a bit of a bad name in design recently, but in my opinion, that's only because of designs that are overly minimalistic. Ultimately, minimalism is meant to take away everything unnecessary to allow the important parts to become louder, not to remove the soul of a piece entirely.

Even toki pona, with its very limited vocabulary, adds a few words that aren't strictly necessary, The ones that usually stand out to people are the animal names -- one could easily say "water-animal" for "kala," but it has its own dedicated word, and I think that's fun and cute!

Besides that, minimalism tends to come off to me as a lot more "sleek," appealing, optimized, and well-designed (remember, I'm still talking solely about subjective appeal for this article!). I can enjoy almost anything that does more with less, and especially so with language, which is a very messy and complicated thing.

I think most of us can agree that many languages have things that are either redundant or can be removed without too much issue, like grammatical gender and words that don't add any extra nuance (see words like "large" vs "big"). This ties in closely to the next category though, so let's continue with:

#2 - Minimalistic languages are easier to learn!

What if every letter always made the same sound instead of whatever English does? Sounds good to me! What if we just removed all conjugation so we didn't have to do all those conjugation tables like in Spanish class? Yes please! What if the language just doesn't have 1 million separate unique words? Sure!

I haven't been able to find any empirical studies suggesting that you can actually learn a minimalistic constructed language faster than a natural language, but I don't think it's too farfetched to assume that a ~1,000 word language with consistent rules would be much faster to learn than a ~1,000,000 word language full of complex rules and exceptions.

Even if it wasn't, languages that appear less intimidating tend to reduce a lot of the friction for me to attempt learning them, which minimalistic languages definitely do for me.

#3 - Less words is less thinking!

Talking... is hard!

There's a lot of mental effort in choosing which words to say, how to say it, and especially for second languages, how to put together grammar. From my personal experience, this is greatly reduced when working with a minimalistic language. When talking about basic things in toki pona, there are usually only really 1 or 2 ways to say it, and I think that relieves a lot of the mental burden.

While I can say I'm a fan of the amount of nuance you can express in English, there are many situations where I would happily take the tradeoff. This is also from my personal experience, where even after taking considerable amounts of time and effort adjusting the way I speak to be the most precise possible, I'm still often misunderstood or have my words misconstrued.

I'll also often misunderstand others' no matter the effort they put into their statements -- sometimes through my own fault, and sometimes because of different interpretations of what certain words actually mean. To me, this conflict makes me feel that the value of nuance in vocabulary is actually a lot less than others see.

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Those should be about my main points! I do think that toki pona is still a bit too minimalistic for me in a lot of situations (it often exacerbates confusion rather than reducing it), but my own conlang Dagapya is probably around the sweetspot where it sheds enough unnecessary details without getting too minimalistic. Still, toki pona has been very helpful for me at times and I still enjoy it a lot.