As we know, Toki Pona is a quite minimal language and it sometimes not easy to come up with a word we use everyday in English. The problem is that I cannot think of a non-culture-specific and easily understandable way of saying right and left.

How to say right (and left) in Toki Pona as those words are not a part of the official dictionary?

  • 5
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a translation request, which I would like to consider off-scope – Adarain Feb 6 '18 at 23:03
  • @Adarain Should this question be closed as well then? conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/12/… – Mateusz Piotrowski Feb 6 '18 at 23:08
  • 5
    Voting to leave open as this isn't a standard word in the toki pona dictionary. – Mithical Feb 6 '18 at 23:11
  • 3
    Relevant meta post: conlang.meta.stackexchange.com/q/30/35. We haven't decided yet that these questions are off-topic; I don't think that we really have a case for closing this. – HDE 226868 Feb 7 '18 at 1:20
  • 1
    If you could provide a reason why this is particularily interesting or difficult translation that would be a fine question, but I don't like it at all as it stands. It would appear that toki-pona runs into similar problems with almost any word. – caconyrn Feb 7 '18 at 1:23

One popular proposal that comes up in a lot of discussions on this topic is to base it on the direction of the official writing system (i.e. Latin characters). Thus "poki open" for left, and "poki pini" for right. However, there is still no real consensus on how to say "right" and "left", so these expressions might not be understood by everyone.


I agree with thrig that you would need to create something to handle this case. toki pona doesn't normally differentiate between specific sides, and this is one of those cases - there are no ways to describe "left" and "right" natively.

However, I'm not sure thrig's examples necessarily do the job the way it needs to be done - poka wawa could work, but it implies something about strength, when that's not often what people mean by dominant and non-dominant side. And meli/mije are not used to describe strength in this way.

Instead, I would suggest using:

  • poka lawa: your leading side.
  • poka kama: your following side.

No matter what, though, if you use this you're going to have to indicate that you're setting it up as such in advance. You can still do this in toki pona itself: mi toki e ni: poka wan li poka lawa. poka tu li poka kama. This sets up that you're saying one side is your poka lawa and the other side is your poka kama.


Building on the answer by thrig: one could say poka pilin (side with a heart) for the left side and poka pilin ala for the right side.

It should be rather neutral and understandable as it is based on biology facts instead of culture-specific ideas.

  • 1
    What about those with the heart on the other side? – Mithical Feb 6 '18 at 23:11
  • @Mithrandir The article says that people usually don't expect the heart to be on the other side. Good catch, though. – Mateusz Piotrowski Feb 6 '18 at 23:16

I have to vote for poka open for left, & poka pini for right. They don't cause any more problem than anything else. poka wawa is a bad idea right-handed people would assume that meant right, but that makes it confusing for left-handed people. Because the sun rises (open) in the East & sets (pini) in the West, we could make "poka suno" East & "poka pimeja" West. "poka kon" could be North, & "poka ma" could be South.

Your Answer

