GoKawiilA statement from members of the Toki Pona community.
Dedicated inbox: [email protected].
April 27, 2026
In the past few days, those of us who are in prominent roles in the Toki Pona community have fielded an increasing number of concerned messages regarding the wellbeing of this language’s creator, who in the past was known as Sonja Lang. More recently, she has used a number of different names; here we will refer to her as Amatullah, the name she used in her most recent publication and has been relatively consistent in using.
First and foremost, this is a statement about someone many of us have considered a cherished friend and mentor. In 2001, Amatullah shared her dearest art project with the world and received a response larger than she had ever imagined. For over two decades since, despite her hesitation and wariness around becoming a public figure, Amatullah has served the people who are drawn to contribute to this living work of art with generosity and patience.
Toki Pona has changed the trajectory of all of our lives, whether that’s through following the language’s original purpose as a meditation tool, using it as a platform to build artistic and educational content for an extremely eager community of learners and speakers, or getting introduced to people who became our close friends or even partners. Many of us can personally attest to Amatullah being a shepherd of others’ endeavors and a source of stability in times of trouble.
This began to change last year. Starting around June, and becoming more visible around August, Amatullah started to come into conflict with many members of the community, often for reasons that were hard to understand. When she sought a community of people who would provide her solutions to a painful situation, a number of us individually tried to support her by serving as ears, brainstorming solutions, and keeping her company. We were slow to recognize just how much the situation was affecting her.
We are not mental health experts, and many of us had no firsthand experience with what to do when a hole to another reality seems to appear at the center of an otherwise lucid person’s reasoning. By November, a few of us began to notice that Amatullah’s speech patterns and her convictions of persecution resembled what we’d seen in people experiencing psychosis—a state in which someone has difficulty distinguishing what is real1—but that only made us more uncertain about how to best support her. In the moment, it seems like you should just be able to talk someone out of a hole like that. But from their perspective, every word you say in disagreement is further evidence that they understand truths about the world that no one else does and that you are one of many people trying to suppress that. We were further alienating her from us, and us from her. We didn’t have a solution then, and don’t have one now.
Our efforts to intervene with Amatullah were complicated by concern for the wellbeing of other community members individually and the Toki Pona project as a whole. Most of the Toki Pona community’s governance is informal and decentralized, but some facets have a formal legal structure. The need to quietly reduce Amatullah’s role in that structure limited our ability to respond publicly in more informal settings. In January, Amatullah was removed from her role as the president of the Sitelen Pona Publishers & Typographers Association (kulupu pali pi sitelen pona). Complicating efforts for a quiet and compassionate transition, Amatullah did not ensure the website domain name, sitelenpona.org, was transferred to the incoming leadership. The Association has redirected the website to sitelenpona.net. She also retains ownership of tokipona.org (historically the de facto homepage for the community) in her individual capacity. The community has now responded by launching a replacement homepage at tokipona.net.
While initially this crisis was visible only to those in direct contact with Amatullah, this has now become a very public, and very tragic, break from reality across her entire online presence. For many of us who have spent the past several months weathering various forms of hostility from her, this is a dramatic reversal of circumstances, to watch her in overt crisis and vulnerable to the many terrifying outcomes possible for someone who suffers in this way so publicly.
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