In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed.
The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that.
So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona - "good language" - and gave it just 120 words.
"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."
Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.
It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena practice of J.R.R. Tolkien , Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.
The Web site Langmaker .com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem.
The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do - "conlang," short for constructed languages.
Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists such as Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.
But to the majority of linguaphiles, conlangs are simply art. Their palette holds not paints but the buzz of the letter "z," the hiss of an "s," the trill of an Italian "r."
And sometimes the howl of a Klingon scream: "Hab SoSlI' Quch!" - "Your mother has a smooth forehead!"
In this realm of art, Toki Pona is white canvas with scattered brush strokes of primary colors.
Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary necessary to communicate. With only 120 words, a Toki Pona speaker must combine words to express more complicated ideas. For example, the Toki Pona phrase for "friend" is jan pona (the "j" sounds like a "y"), literally "good person."
Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona's vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.
"It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it," Kisa said.
Tolkien liked to call invented language his "secret vice." He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.
Eventually, his languages needed tongues to speak them, and those speakers needed a place to live. And thus Middle-Earth was born, with Tolkien's languages becoming the Sindarin and Quenya of the Elves, the Khuzdul of the Dwarves, and the Black Speech of the Orcs.
Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by Polish doctor Ludovic Zamenhof. His dream was to give humanity a common international language that would be simple to learn. Esperanto's vocabulary is small, word order does not matter and there are no irregular verbs.
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