A tiny language for real conversation

Pikotika is a constructed auxiliary language with fewer than 200 root words, built for real-world conversation. Its name is piko-tika — small talk. It is designed to be learnable in a weekend, forgiving of accents, and a genuinely useful way for two people to communicate who may have no other language in common.

By tomorrow you could be saying:

Pikotika is tiny

There are fewer than 200 base or "root" words you need to learn; everything else is built from those. And even the root words are mostly easy to learn, because they share common roots with English and Romance languages. For example:

• moni — money, price (English money, Latin moneta)
• porta — door, gate (English portal, Spanish puerta)

• →moniporta — turnstyle, ticket gate

Most compound words really are that easy: once you learn the base words, you can usually guess at the meaning of a compound even if you haven't seen it before, or construct one you need on the spot that others are likely to understand.

Pikotika is simple

Grammar in Pikotika is extraordinary simple. The basic sentence structure is:

Those two little words, ri and a, are called particles, and they act like signposts to make it clear where the subject, verb, and object are.

Unlike many languages which change the form of verbs to indicate tense, person, and number (e.g. go, goes, went), Pikotika word forms never change. Like Mandarin, you use other words as needed to indicate whether you're talking about past, present, or future; you don't change the words themselves.

All this means that learning to speak and understand Pikotika grammar is even easier than learning the vocabulary.

Pikotika is usable

Despite being so small and simple, Pikotika has everything you need to get around and interact with people in the real world, including:

• a full numbering system, including decimals and fractions
• days of the week, months of the year, and seasons
• words to describe foods, including preferences and allergies
• language for asking and giving directions
• modern words like vortotika (cell phone) and rinekaroroko (transit station)

That means that learning Pikotika isn't just a fun hobby and good mental exercise; it's potentially a language you could use to communicate with other Pikotika speakers, anywhere in the world, in any situation.

Start learning now!

The Learn tab at the top of this website presents organized lessons and games that will have you speaking and reading Pikotika within minutes, and mastery can be achieved in weeks. And the links at the bottom of each page will take you to places on Reddit and Discord where you can talk about (or in!) Pikotika with other learners. Give it a try today!