COUNTERS TO MINIMALISTIC AUXLANG OBJECTIONS
October 4, 2026 - Published
Ever since toki pona took off in popularity, the idea of a minimalistic auxlang has been in serious contention. Part of this is, of course, due to the fact that toki pona was not designed as an auxlang, but was pushed as a potential auxlang by some people regardless.
This article isn't about toki pona (at least primarily), but instead about common objections I hear towards the concept of a minimalistic auxlang in general. While I do think there are valid reasons to be against the international auxiliary language being minimalistic, the objections I hear are usually weirdly baseless, despite how often they circulate.
That's not meant as an insult, but should hopefully become more clear throughout the article. I'll start with the easiest objection, which is objectively incorrect.
1) A minimalistic language cannot work because, in language, every concept needs a dedicated word.
This is a really bizarre one that I've seen multiple times. It doesn't really make sense, but I think it comes from the common confusion that comes from beginner toki pona speakers.
toki pona has roughly 130 words, which can make it difficult to refer to specific things. For example, the word "seli" can mean both "hot" and "fire," so without separate words, how could you possibly say whether something is hot instead of burning?
Well, believe it or not, you are able to refer to an exclusive concept in a language by using multiple words. This is extremely common, and we don't even have to use another language as an example.
As a simple example, the number 101 does not have a root word in English. We do have a word for 100 which is "hundred," but not a root word for the number that comes after it. Whoa, does that mean English can't count past a hundred?
No, of course not. We just say "one hundred and one." It sounds ridiculous that I have to explain this in this way, but it's an extremely common misconception that toki pona can't count past 2 because it doesn't have a root word for 3.
One counter I've heard is that this point doesn't extend to obvious compounds. For example, English doesn't have a single word for the middle finger, but it's obvious that it's the finger in the middle because it can't refer to anything else. However, that doesn't explain every compound.
If I say "red panda," those words alone sound like they're referring to a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) that's colored red. However, it actually refers to an Ailurus fulgens, despite only being distantly related to the giant panda. This is a multi-word phrase that refers to something extremely specific without being fully logical (note that this also applies to the species names, meaning that there's no singular word to refer unambiguously to red pandas!).
From my understanding, this is called a lexicalized compound, despite the words being separated. English has many of these with varying degrees of logic, like "ice cream" and "high school," where you can roughly figure out what "ice cream" is based on the words, while "high school" requires an entire understanding of the current country's education system to know the precise meaning.
So, how do you differentiate between "hot" and "fire" if there aren't separate words for them? You use multiple words!*
2) Language requires more words than a minimalistic language can contain.
This is a less rigid version of #1, and probably the most common objection from auxlangers. Of course, there's not really proof for this at all.
I will say that there's not much in terms of reliable studies for this specific subject, but there is the natural semantic metalanguage theory which is surprisingly close, and more robust than I expected with the decades of research between multiple linguists and languages.
This theory includes "semantic primes," which are meant to be universal (cross-linguistic) terms that cannot be expressed with simpler words. For example, "legs" are "two long parts of someone's body; they are below the body; because of these two parts, people can move." Since "legs" can be described in simpler words, they cannot be considered a semantic prime. However, take a word from the description like "can" and it may be difficult or impossible to simplify it further. Once this is done with essentially every word, you have your semantic primes.
So, the question is: how many semantic primes did these studies land on? Well, only a little over 60.
If a word isn't a semantic prime, that means that it can be defined by semantic primes. In other words, according to the NSM theory, it is perfectly possible to have a fully functioning language in only about 60 words -- more than that, it should hypothetically be able to define any word in any language.
For reference, this is about half of toki pona's vocabulary. A minimalistic language should absolutely be able to have more than 60 words.
Of course, this brings up a very obvious objection: while it's possible that a language with just 60 words is functional, it certainly can't be practical. Talking would be exhausting if you needed multiple sentences just to say what "legs" were every single time.
Well, I agree!
However, a minimalistic language isn't necessarily one with 60 words or 130 words. In fact, Mini is a minimalistic auxlang with 1,000 words. There's no concrete limit on how many words a minimalistic language needs to have before it stops being considered minimalistic, but since natural languages easily exceed 10,000 words, I don't think that it's unreasonable to refer to 1,000 words or even possibly 2,000 words as minimalistic.
Since 60 words are the lower limit for a practical language, and 130 is contentious, I don't think it'd be unreasonable to expect a language with 400 or 1,000 or 2,000 words to be practical.
Unfortunately, that's as far as my reasoning can go, because proving whether or not something is "practical" is very subjective in this case,** so I don't expect concrete proof to be possible, whether for or against my argument. However, I will mention that the experienced Mini speakers I asked felt strongly about Mini having enough words for communication and any translation, which the wiki supports.
3) A language with a minimalistic phonology cannot function, because words would need to be excessively long to differentiate themselves.
This one is based on the assumption that a minimalistic language, with a minimalistic phonology, would cause more words to sound similar (see toki pona phrases like "kala ma" vs "kalama"). That'd require words and phrases to be longer than the average language to be differentiated, which would make the language impractical to use.
Now, I could walk you through the math and explain that a language with just 10 consonants, 5 vowels, and a CV syllable structure could produce over 125,000 unique words with 3 syllables or less (hypothetically, much more than enough to make differentiable words), but this hasn't seemed to be enough to convince people. Instead, let's look at a practical example: Hawaiian!
Hawaiian has only 8 consonants and 5 vowels. For comparison, toki pona has 9 consonants and 5 vowels, meaning that Hawaiian, despite being a naturalistic language not designed specifically for minimalism, has LESS letters than toki pona (the phonology is technically more complicated due to allophones and such, but it's still VERY simple for a natural language).
Of course, being a natural language, it was spoken for at least hundreds of years with plenty of opportunity to evolve and become more complex and "practical." However, that is the phonology it settled on, and they still named the state fish the humuhumunukunukuāpua'a. There really is no more proof I need to provide than "a natural language did this and it functioned perfectly fine."
There is a possible objection which is "even if it's functional, it might be too much for speakers used to more complicated phonologies," but I don't really understand why people seem allergic to having to speak a few more syllables. Many languages can be heavy on the syllables, even if they have more complex phonologies.
Polish, with its famously difficult phonology, still has 3x the amount of syllables for the English word "man" (mężczyzna). Spanish, which is very widely spoken, has 2x the amount of syllables for "carrot" (zanahoria). Japanese, which has a much simpler phonology than English, has no issue with 4x the amount of syllables (if analyzed as syllables) for "friend" (ともだち). Even Esperanto, an auxlang that isn't minimalistic, has 3x the amount of syllables for "small" (malgranda).
Yes, these are a bit cherry-picked, but my general point is that if the only issue with having a simpler phonology is "words can get a bit long," I don't think most people actually have an issue with words being a bit long in practice.
4) A minimalistic language does not have the vocabulary to be rich in meaning.
This is an objection I hear often from people that are less connected to the auxlang community. I initially didn't want to address it because it's a very opinionated objection, but I think I have enough thoughts to justify a response.
First of all, of course, whether or not a language is "rich in meaning" does not decide how viable it is as an auxlang. Just because a language does not differentiate between "angry" and "furious" does not automatically ban it from being a world language. I think most people saying this objection recognize this and understand that they're just speaking their personal feelings, but it's still worth mentioning.
Second of all, I'm required to mention that I find this line of thinking extremely dangerous. This doesn't apply as much to constructed languages, but I've found a disturbing number of comments that seem to imply that languages that are "simpler" or have a "smaller range of expression" are somehow lesser than other languages. That's super racist!!! I understand not preferring a language on a personal level if it doesn't allow you to easily express the things you want to express, which is perfectly fine, but it's for that reason that I don't like this attitude even when it's directed towards constructed languages.
Third of all... you all know that not every word in every language has an exact equivalent in other languages, right?
This can be difficult to explain, so let me put it this way. In English, there's a nuance between saying "I'm doing good" and "I'm doing fine." In Spanish, there is no difference, and you can only say "Estoy bien."
In Spanish, there's a nuance between saying "está" and "es," but in English, both words are just "is." In English, there's a difference between "warm" and "hot," but in French, it's just "chaud." In English, there's a difference between "quick" and "early," but in Japanese, it's just "はやい".
In Japanese, there's a difference between "あなた", "あんた", "おまえ", "てめえ", "きさま", and "きみ", but in English the only real equivalent is "you."
To put it simply, no matter what language you're speaking, there will be a lot of information that's lost between languages. If you're making a new language, it is inevitable that it will lose a lot of information, especially if one of the primary goals is that people of different languages will be able to easily learn it, which biases the language against putting in nuanced language-specific words.
In other words, making an auxlang that loses information between languages isn't a downside of the language -- it's an inevitability in making the language. Personally, I haven't yet seen an auxlang that includes both "あなた" and "きみ", but I also haven't seen anyone complain about that.
That being said, it is NOT impossible to make a minimalistic conlang that has nuance unavailable in, say, English. I saw a video on a minimalistic auxlang that had evidentials (couldn't find the video to source, sorry!), and one of my favorite toki pona songs likujo has a special toki pona specific nuance due to its culture around nimisin, despite the words technically being translatable.
My own conlang Dagapya has modal particles, flexible word order, and unique suffixes which can all provide nuance that can't be done in the same way with English. These features can be fit into either the grammar or next to a fully-functioning minimalistic vocabulary.
Every single language, natural or constructed, has tradeoffs in terms of the specific nuances that they can convey, and minimalistic languages are the same. Even if an auxlang (minimalistic or not) can't convey the exact nuances that, for example, English, Japanese, and Polish can, that doesn't mean that the language can't bring its own unique traits and advantages to the table.
And really, isn't that what we're learning new languages for?
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* It's worth mentioning that in a lot of cases, a lexical compound isn't even required. The Japanese word "あれ" is often translated as "that over there," which as far as I understand isn't really a lexical phrase. However, it still gets the same idea across by using multiple words. This is important to mention partly because lexical compounds are considered contentious in the toki pona community.
I also chose to not give sample compounds for "hot" and "fire" because I'm not very fluent in toki pona and don't want to give off misinformation. If I had to, I would use "pilin seli" (hot-feeling) for "hot" and "seli pakala" (destroying-heat) for fire or burning.
** I've seen such a wild range of comments on this, so it's kind of difficult to elaborate on. A lot of people seem to think that more vocabulary makes languages more practical, but I would actually argue that the opposite is often the case -- ask anyone who studies entomology and not etymology, which would not be an issue if we just called it insect-science.
Someone once pointed out to me that a minimalistic language would not be able to differentiate between the terms "blinds" and "shutters." As a native English speaker, my first response was to search up the difference, because I didn't actually know what it was. Having specific terms like this is helpful, but only as long as everyone knows what each word means, which is less possible the larger the vocabulary is.
I've also seen someone argue that a language requires highly specific technical terms like "baluster," which is a word I had never known up until that moment, and could have lived my entire life to my death without losing anything of value if I had not learned that word.
I do agree that there is some point above the minimum 60 words where language switches from "technically functional" to "actually practical in the real world," but that line is ambiguous and unlikely to be found in the near future (which again, is why I'm frustrated when people act like they know what it is). Spanish literally refers to "the weekend" as "el fin de semana" and I know for a fact that if a minimalistic language took 4 words to refer to the weekend, then everyone would throw a fit.