How Kokanu is being Developed

Past

While the seeds of Kokanu were first planted in mid 2020 as Toki Ma, early development was chaotic and crowd-sourced. It was in mid 2021 when development was internally moved to a more structured mechanism on a different discord server and a stable draft was published.

Ever since 2021, to now, 2025, a lot of work is put in to practice, and iterate on the language.

In 2023, for example, the entire vocabulary of the language was reworked, mostly because the parent language toki pona did not have vocabulary that met the principle of Neutrality. This is also when "toki ma" was changed into Kokanu, an abbreviation "te kota kan usen", meaning "To talk with each another".

The Discord Committee

Decisions are taken by the Discord Committee. Anyone can join to be a member (Discord Invite) There are ongoing talks in the committee to add more sub-structure, but as of now decisions are taken mostly via supermajority vote, and/or getting consensus both between the general members of the committee and the "managers": senior members that have contributed a lot of time and are fully onboard with the principles.

Current Timeline

The current plan to a stable beta release, as voted on by the Discord Committee in early 2025, is as such:

Finish Grammar discussions (DONE)
Finalize Grammar till Beta release (DONE)
Finish Vocabulary and Word-Labelling discussions (IN PROGRESS, Estimated to be done in April 2025)
Finalize an Alpha Release (for limited use only, vocab and labelling to be changed)
Extensively use Alpha version of Kokanu
Create a whole host of vocab/labelling discussions based on usage
Iterate through the new discussions in a high throughput manner
Finalize and release a Beta version of Kokanu

Principles

The way Kokanu chooses to do anything is based on its core principles.

pucun je saman | Neutrality

The principle of neutrality is based on neutrality of languages, and the general principle that every human is weighed the same. Generally, when many languages do things differently, we try to make it such that Kokanu is flexible, and that every language's speakers can express the concept in their own ways. However, there is limits to this, generally more than 90% of the world doing things in a certain way may be selected as the only way to do something in Kokanu, or certain grammatical choices may be chosen based on other principles first.

This principle can appear in ways such as:

The words of Kokanu are sourced roughly proportionally to the first language distribution of the world.
Kokanu has free word order, so that people can express their thoughts in their preferred order

This is the principle that most definitively separates Kokanu from other IAL attempts. Kokanu tries to keep things, especially Vocabulary, as minimal as possible

To see how this principle is exercised, check out the Vocabulary Principles section

pucun je tomiwa | Practicality

This is a rather vague principle, but essentially this boils down to: the language should not feel unnatural, and should be able to express normal language things rather succinctly

To see how this principle is exercised, check out the Vocabulary Principles section

Vocabulary Principles

Derived from the Kokanu principles listed above, most notably the Minimalism and Practicality principles, to add a new word in Kokanu, people must give a justification using these principles. A justification is to be given relative to the minimal precedent already present in the language, something like if X word already exists, this rule should also make Y word exist since the rule applies more to it than X.

These discussions are still very subjective, but these rules give a structure to discussion.

pucun satalan | The Normal Clause

If a necessary/common concept can not be precisely expressed in Kokanu, it needs the sufficient vocabulary necessary to express it

Necessity and preciseness are based on precedent and other words that are admitted under normal clause.

For example, we did not have a word for think, we needed to say some compound "feel" or "know" or "head". So we added a word for think (this word is now kanisa)

Note: This does not mean the word needs to be said in a single word or a short compound.

pucun non | The Compound Clause

If a necessary/common concept occurs in many common compounds, such that the long compounds are used verbatim as the common concepts, vocabulary should be added to simplify its expression

Necessity, commonness and length of compound to be based on precedent and other words admitted under this clause Note: This clause is to be used the least, and only for special examples that simplify a huge swath of compounds Example: Words such as pixel, speck, (chemical) atom, cell all can be represented in Kokanu by saying smallest indivisible part of X. If that becomes a single word, we simplify all of those concepts. We therefore added a word for the smallest indivisble particle/atom, now sala.

pucun je pen kikuwa, pucun je Ato Kanta | The Ato Kanta Clause

If a necessary/common concept has a representation in Kokanu, but it is technically correct, and not how people actually see/rationalize that concept, vocabulary is needed to fix that

Necessity and commonality based on precedent. Generally, the concept should be cross culturally important

Best examples are in the name, internally used in the server. Ato was to be represented by a moving structure, Kanti as artistic sounds. But these are both overtly technical representations and not necessarily how people rationalize these things (vehicles and music).