Recently i have come to the realization that the label “fluency” doesn’t really mean anything? the only reason i can think of to label yourself as fluent in toki pona within the community is to gain status. but i don’t really like that because whenever i see someone i don’t know self label as fluent, i kind of don’t believe them until i talk to them? i have had the best conversations with toki ponists when i didn’t know wether or not they consider themselves fluent, and i no longer label myself as such.
what do you think? why do you identify with or without the label of “fluent”? how do you measure fluency?
i do find it really difficult to tell what counts as “fluent” in toki pona
for me what stops me from considering myself fluent is generally my lack of listening ability, i find it hard to make out toki pona when spoken out loud. i’m also a lot worse at speaking and understanding when i’m tired.
i personally call myself “proficient” to essentially mean the following: i think i speak in a way others can understand, and i should be able to understand most toki pona spoken to me
Fluency is just the ability to understand and be understood with minimal effort. I don’t see how that has anything to do with status, or how that wouldn’t apply to toki pona. In fact, I feel that the concept applies to toki pona the most, because due to its nature, it exists in an ever shifting idiolect continuum, and you need to keep track of where and when you are fluent, not only whether you are
The recent “fluency doesn’t exist in toki pona” seems, to me, like a continuation of the whole “ma pona is a broken mess” thing, because “ma pona is bad!! and it has toki pona fluency roles!!! therefore those must be bad as well!!” but, no, ma pona just has its own dialect of toki pona, and so to be understood in it, your idiolect will have to be within that idiolect continuum. You can be fluent in ma pona, and non-fluent somewhere else.
Hm. I haven’t been in ma pona in several months (by choice) and I still see people identifying as fluent, as a binary identity. Like putting “fluent toki pona” in their bio. (you have done this, for example.) And I really don’t like it! as you mentioned, wether or not you’re fluent is much less important than where you are fluent. (and this isn’t as unique to toki pona as you’re making it out to be.)
but also “fluency is just the ability to understand and be understood with minimal effort” is one of many common definitions of “fluency.” Recently I asked a lot of toki pona speakers and speakers of other languages what “fluent” meant to them, and they all had completely different ideas. The idea of a “native speaker” came up a lot, and that fluency can only exist in relation to the proficiency level of a native speaker. This definition is a bit problematic for several reasons, but I don’t want to get into them right now (though I’m willing to discuss more if people are curious). But this is one reason why fluency as a concept wouldn’t apply to toki pona; many people define fluency in direct relation to something that toki pona lacks completely.
I have no idea if ma pona is still a broken mess or not. It is frankly not on my radar. I have several IRLs who speak toki pona (including one that I’m dating) and I have a LOT of toki pona speaking friends online who I talk to frequently off of ma pona pi toki pona. “ma pona is a broken mess” is not on my mind. ma pona’s fluency roles are not on my mind. The boolean of “fluent vs not fluent” IS on my mind, and it is directly BECAUSE that can’t be defined outside of context that I think people should not identify with the label of “fluent toki pona.”
and re: status. I have seen a LOT of people like all over the place saying “I am a fluent toki pona speaker, choose me!” and stuff along those lines. I really don’t want to call out anyone who’s doing this (nobody on this forum so far has done this, to be clear), so I won’t say specific names. But I am starting to see social structures in toki pona spaces arise that mimic neocolonial social structures around language that put ideas of more “fluent” people above the ideas of those who are “less” fluent.
That is like a lot of thought though and idk how much of it holds up. But even so I think that people should avoid the label “fluent” for toki pona.
lol a lot of people i know define their proficiency in relation to @tbodt’s. Like someone was like “I can hold a fast paced conversation with jan Tepo.” Which is really funny and gives me a good sense of their fluency, but only because I know jan Tepo. I think descriptions of what environments you succeed in and how much is a lot better than something that people disagree on, like “fluent,” definitionally.
my personal definition of ‘fluent’ has always been a bit different from the sort of measurement-like system others seem to use.
the way i define it is the point at which forming new speech (or reading/listening to speech) doesn’t involve translation into some other language in order to produce/comprehend.
like when i say “mi moku”, i don’t first think in english “i eat” and then translate “i eat” into toki pona as “mi moku”, i just think and say “mi moku”. associating the semantic spaces directly with what i want to say rather than “translating”.
this may be a bit too subjective and so not a very “useful” definition, but it’s what i’ve always associated with it.
Yeah this is a completely different definition of “fluent” to anything mentioned! which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s reason enough that the label itself is more of a buzzword than anything. It’s also something I’ve heared from a few toki ponists and non-toki ponists about fluency for languages that they speak.
Just the fact that fluency is defined around a native speaker doesn’t mean it can’t be extended to mean other things. Words do this all the time. The words “words” and “do” did it just now, in the previous sentence
The ideas (that regard a language) of a speaker that is more proficient (in that language) will naturally end up spreading to those who are less confident of their own ability to speak it, right? Because the ones who feel more capable of speaking in a language will feel like teaching to those who feel less capable, and those who feel less capable will want to learn. This is simply the birth of a conlang’s dialect, there’s nothing much more to it than that
If someone disagrees with the people who are currently considered most proficient in a community, they might decide to just deviate from what they do, and people who are compelled by the way they speak will listen to them in matters of that disagreement, forming their own opinions etc, and this is how dialects split and evolve over time
In regards to ma pona: I also have not been in it in a long, long while, but it has popped up in conversations from time to time. The contexts where I have seen it are what leads me to believe that any matters of hostility against dialectal difference in the toki pona community, stem from it. But even back then, I recall seeing different ways of speaking that didn’t align with ma pona’s dialect “taking flight” so to speak
I’m less worried about the ideas of someone who actually is more fluent spreading. I’m worried about the ideas of someone who uses the label “fluent” being spread more readily than the ideas of someone who may be just as proficient but doesn’t use that label to describe themselves.
Especially when fluency is defined so many different ways, the idea alone that the label’s usage can influence status is (in a very minor way) frustrating to me. Like if it doesn’t actually mean anything consistent, how is this a good thing?
you’re definitely right that hostility to intentional differences in speaking stems from ma pona.
But I want to challenge the idea that ma pona has a unique dialect continuüm that are all more similar to each other than they are to lects outside of ma pona. I don’t think that’s true! When I was on it, I saw people there speaking in lots of different ways, and now that I’ve left it, I see the exact same amount of variation.
@gregdan3’s n-gram viewer for toki pona usage in most places may eventually be useful in analyzing this but I haven’t seen it being used for that.
I think that’s just part of the nature of dialects and language in general. It’s not going to be consistent. It’s not good, but I also don’t find it bad either. It’s completely neutral.
Do you remember when we discovered that VK users speak toki pona in a way that is unintelligible from ma pona’s? Isn’t that so fascinating?
I think this inconsitency in the meaning of the word fluency is one of the ways that dialects end up like that (although VK is not an example of this, as it was like that just because it developed in isolation from ma pona)
Toki pona might be a conlang, but it began spreading and growing in a way similar to a natural language very long ago.
Huh! I don’t know! Long story short, VK is a russian social media platform. One day, a ma pona user discovered that there are toki pona communities in it… and they all speak it in a way that was completely alien to us. We could not figure out anything. To this day I’m so fascinated by that fact
i use toki pona every day and never really have any problems communicating, yet i hesitate to label myself as fluent. i guess that toki pona la…it doesn’t really mean anything to me i guess? not sure but it’s never felt right
oh! huh. well. I do not, remember that! maybe it was before my time; you are more majuna than I am. but that’s interesting; I am also interested, because I’ve talked to multiple jan lupa before and I can understand them just fine. but all of them also speak english. so idk.