**i originally wrote this ramble late at night, but later realized i could get to the point much more concisely, so i'm rewriting it (though, still late at night). you can read the original under Read More.
an auxlang is defined as an International Auxiliary Language, a hypothetical extra language that everyone in the world would know (in addition to their first language) in order to communicate with people around the world. we all know English is the de facto auxlang, but we also all know that it's not very easy for people to learn.
toki pona is not a perfect language for communication. it's ambiguous, not very specific, and it cannot express super complex ideas, by design. however, it is basically the perfect auxlang for one reason: people WANT to learn it.
an auxiliary language is NOT restricted by definition to need to be able to express all possible/complex ideas -- it only needs to be good enough for people of different nations to communicate and express ideas. having a limited vocabulary allows this, AND makes the language a lot less intimidating/time-consuming to learn. you don't NEED a unique word for "banana" when you can just say "yellow fruit stick", and you don't NEED a unique word for "computer" when you can just say "number tool" or "light box" -- people will know what you mean based on context.
in terms of auxiliary languages, having a language that fits its ENTIRE grammar and vocabulary on a single double-sided piece of paper is an EXTREMELY powerful tool to me. even if someone isn't fluent in it, they could hypothetically figure their way around a broken conversation very easily just by having that on hand, no matter what their first language is.
and this isn't even mentioning the other great design decisions -- the phonology is flexible enough for everyone to pronounce, the word choices are very cute and appealing, the grammar is super simple, etc., all of which encourage people to learn it. toki pona might have not originally been designed as an auxlang, but it's very clearly an auxlang that a lot of people have wanted and decided to learn. and i think that's a really important thing to admire and encourage!
i mentioned this briefly in my last conlang ramble (https://cohost.org/Vecderg/post/2470461-ido-time), but while studying Ido, it's still such a shocking difference.
when you read about Ido it'll constantly talk about how it's the easiest language in existence, and to its credit, all the rules could probably fit on a single page! but then you get hit by the vocab and it's like a brick wall of thousands of words. if you run into a word in the wild, and its roots could come from anywhere between 5-7 languages, you're pretty much doomed unless you committed it to memory.
whether it was done intentionally or not, toki pona gets so many features right that are so PERFECT for an auxlang. an international auxiliary language is a hypothetical language that people across nations would share without replacing their native language. the very simple act of lowering the word count (along with simplified grammar of course) makes the language easy to obtain and not have the vocabulary issue.
if i'm going to japan and i don't speak a word, then they don't care about how well i speak english, so i am going to speak english like a caveman in the hopes that they pick up words. "i need a taxi!! me need car! where... car?? vroom vroom??" having agreed-upon words for that would be like the ideal international language, and toki pona solves that problem by making it so you dont need to learn 1,000 words to talk about simple things. "computer" is a pretty complicated object, but if i said "light-box" you'd have a pretty good idea of what i was talking about with the right context, and if you didn't then i could just add more details!
outsiders who talk about toki pona seem to miss the point that being specific in language isn't always necessary. if i want to write a book that talks in vivid detail about scenery and poetically uses nuance in language, then ok maybe toki pona isn't ideal. but to me the use case that'd make the most sense for an auxlang would be people from different countries being able to communicate and hold a conversation. and when you can learn toki pona's grammar on one piece of paper and hold the entirety of its vocabulary on another (i.e. you don't even need to MEMORIZE everything), that to me is an unimaginably powerful language that could work really well as a hypothetical international bridge-builder.
i was also going to talk about how the vocabulary uses a good spread of languages / how the design is really cute and makes it appealing for more people to learn / how the lack of conjugation and separation of words makes speaking feel really easy, but this is getting really long and i think i already got my point across and i need to sleep so night night