Chapter 12

A language for the commons

In the summer of 2021, a London animation studio called The Line released a short film commissioned by a yogurt company. "Dear Alice" is a grandmother's farm in a lush green future: drone harvesters over tended fields, a kitchen full of light, a score by Joe Hisaishi, the composer whose music raised a generation on Miyazaki (The Line 2021). The solarpunk community watched its own dream rendered at feature quality, and then it did the characteristic thing. Three months later a viewer under the name Waffle To The Left reposted the film with every logo painted out and the sound rebuilt, under the title "'Dear Alice' Decommodified Edition." The stated reason deserves quoting whole: the original "is one of the most beautiful depictions of an ecological future I had seen, except for one glaring thing: it was an advertisement for a dairy company, and my solarpunk vision doesn't have either of those things," and the paint-out existed "so that solarpunks like myself can enjoy this beautiful world without having to invite the ugliness of capitalism into it" (Waffle To The Left 2021).

A community that edits the advertising out of its own dream, by hand, for free. That is the first community this language expects to meet, and this chapter is about why the meeting is right: the movement's founding documents ask for something a language is, the values match pillar for pillar, and the way such a community adopts anything tells you exactly how a language would have to arrive.

The movement that asked for a vocabulary

Solarpunk is young enough that its whole paper trail fits on a desk. The word is from 2008, coined in an anonymous blog post that proposed "a new literary genre: solarpunk" for stories of sail freighters and revived older technologies (Republic of the Bees 2008). The aesthetic condensed in 2014, when a Tumblr artist posted concept art of an Art Nouveau garden future under the note "what I want to see is Solarpunk" (Olivia 2014), and Adam Flynn, writing on Arizona State University's Hieroglyph project, gave the young movement its first notes toward a manifesto: "it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community," with "an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance," and a long horizon he compressed into one sentence Phi has loved from a distance ever since: "Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time" (Flynn 2014).

In 2019 the movement wrote itself a founding document. "A Solarpunk Manifesto," published by The Solarpunk Community as a collective re-adaptation of the scattered earlier texts, opens on a question, "what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?", plants its flag in defiant hope, "We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back," and draws one hard genre boundary: utopian, optimistic, or concerned with the struggle, "but never dystopian" (The Solarpunk Community 2019).

Then, seven propositions in, the manifesto says what it thinks it is offering. "Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future."

What the pillars put into the language

Phi's development protocol names five pillars, and solarpunk is the first. This is not a courtship arranged for this chapter; the manual opens its pillar teaching on a roof catching rain for the garden below. What the pillar put into the language is concrete and countable. It gave the lexicon its solar spine: sileta is the sun, the day is read from the sky in the eight stations chapter 2 walked through, and east is the sun's beginning. It gave Phi nuri, the cycle, the course that comes round to a comparable beginning, compost to soil, stored water to garden, repaired chair to use. It put the repair family and the steward's verbs in the working vocabulary and left the vocabulary of domination out, which is the peace-linguistics pillar and the solarpunk pillar agreeing in public.

The other pillars pay into the same account. The manifesto's aesthetics list names Art Nouveau outright, and Art Nouveau is Phi's third pillar: the language's sound system was built for organic, flowing lines, open syllables and pure vowels in unhurried procession, the audible version of the tendril forms the movement canonized. The manifesto calls for solutions "to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share," and kindness under pressure is what the Buddhist and peace-linguistics pillars built into the lexicon's deepest layer: the Metta Sutta was the first text on Phi's shelf. Flynn's permaculturists thinking in cathedral time have their grammar waiting: a language that tells time by the sun and counts its years in threes is pre-industrial wisdom worn openly, the fifth pillar in daily use.

Alignment this close could be suspected of flattery if it were claimed loosely, so here is the checkable version. In 2026 Phi translated the manifesto whole: all five opening paragraphs, all twenty-two propositions, every block validated, with the English witness preserved line by line beside the Phi. The translation needed not one new root. A language built on these five pillars, pointed at the movement's charter, found every concept already nameable, from the false scarcity the manifesto attacks to the self-sustaining nests it hopes for. That is what it looks like when a vocabulary and a paradigm have been waiting for each other.

How adoption actually runs

If some solarpunk readers take up Phi, the shape of what follows is already known, because sociolinguistics has watched communities and their languages make each other for decades. A community of practice knits itself through shared doing, and talk is the most portable of its practices (Lave and Wenger 1991; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). And when a community sets itself apart from a mainstream on purpose, its language work starts at the vocabulary: Halliday studied the speech of subcultures that stand deliberately against the society around them and found the same move everywhere, new words grown over the host language's grammar, words first and grammar never (Halliday 1976). Solarpunk's manifesto glosses the punk in its own name with rebellion and counterculture, which makes the mechanism its birthright. The book's bet, built on those findings rather than found in them, is that a community like this adopts a language the way it adopted its name: a greeting at the end of a forum post, a word for the thing the old words sold short, a motto, a name for a child or a boat, long before anyone conjugates anything.

Phi is unusually well shaped for that entrance. Its words are designed to travel alone: short, open-syllabled, carrying their meaning in a story a speaker can retell at the moment of use. A community member who knows nothing else about the language can greet a forum thread with kia and have used the word exactly as its dictionary intends. Which words are likeliest to make the trip, and what happens to a designed word when it escapes, is the next chapter's whole subject. This chapter's point is smaller and firmer: for this community, words arriving first is not a compromised version of adoption. It is what adoption is.

Gift-first or not at all

The decommodified edition teaches the distribution rule, and the movement has enforced it more than once: this commons polices its gates against enclosure, and anything arriving with a price tag or a brand gets the paint-out treatment. Chapter 8 already met the sharpest version of the community's scrutiny, the generative-AI question, and answered it in the colophon rather than in fine print. Distribution is the easier half of the exam, because Phi's answers predate the questions. The language lives on a public site with no account, no tier, and nothing for sale, under the license chapter 6 described, the one that gives the system itself away. And when Phi translated the manifesto, it inherited the manifesto's own Creative Commons share-alike license and says so on the page: the movement's charter, rendered in the language, is distributed in the movement's own legal dialect of the gift.

The door

One inheritance from the invented century still has to be claimed on purpose. Esperanto bound itself to an ethos and then spent decades managing the consequences. Zamenhof told the 1907 Cambridge congress that its gatherings were "ne sole kongresoj de la lingvo Esperanto, sed ankaŭ de la interna ideo de la esperantismo": not congresses of the language alone, but of the internal idea of Esperantism (Zamenhof 1907). And the movement had already been obliged, two years earlier at Boulogne, to declare that merely using the language commits a speaker to no idea at all. The tension between the tool and the creed never fully resolved, and every values-built language since has inherited the question: what happens to the person who wants the language without the politics?

Phi's answer is built, not promised. The pillars are documented in the open, the manifesto translation sits on the shelf for anyone to weigh, and nothing in the grammar or the license asks a speaker's allegiance. The vocabulary of care, repair, and testimony works as well in a hospice as at a climate march. A reader who wants only a beautiful, difficult language gets the whole language; the philosophy rides along as documentation, not as dues. Toki Pona's community, asked whether its teenagers would grow into Esperantists, answered that it tries "to open doors in all directions" (Toki Pona n.d.), and that is the right family habit for a small language among friends.

In the garden

The manifesto's prose ends on the best three sentences the movement has written about itself: "We're no longer overlords. We're caretakers. We're gardeners." On Phi's shelf, that proposition reads:

lo mia lo theluo nai. lo mia lo whu thepalu temoe miona nai.
PL 1SG PL steward be. PL 1SG PL REL garden tend person be.
(We are stewards. We are people who tend gardens.)

Phi renders the renunciation before the roles: the translation's fuller passage lays down authority over Earth, muila karami, in its own clause, and only then takes up the steward and the gardener. The movement wrote its self-portrait in 2019. The language could say it, word for word and value for value, the day they met.

So the case for solarpunk first closes without needing luck: a movement whose manifesto asks for a paradigm and a vocabulary, a language whose first pillar carries that movement's name and whose shelf already holds its charter under its own license, an adoption path of words traveling first that the community's habits and the linguistics of countercultures agree on, and a door held open for whoever wants the tongue without the creed, because the century's ghosts taught that lesson early. The gardeners have been tending a future that had everything except a way of speaking built on what they believe. That language exists. It sits on the shelf beside their manifesto, and it begins with the sun.

References

Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461-488. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002333.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 2024. Solarpunk. Entry first archived August 5, 2024; updated April 6, 2026. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/solarpunk.

Flynn, Adam. 2014. Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto. Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, September 4. https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/.

GummySearch. 2026. r/solarpunk subreddit statistics: approximately 201,000 members, retrieved July 22, 2026. https://gummysearch.com/r/solarpunk/.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. Anti-Languages. American Anthropologist 78(3): 570-584. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1976.78.3.02a00050.

Harris, Lee. 2018. Announcing a Pair of Solarpunk Novellas from Becky Chambers. Tor.com, July 18. Now at https://reactormag.com/announcing-a-pair-of-solarpunk-novellas-from-becky-chambers/.

Hugo Awards. 2022. 2022 Hugo Awards. Best Novella: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers (Tordotcom). Presented at Chicon 8, Chicago, September 4. https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2022-hugo-awards/.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355.

The Line. 2021. Dear Alice. Animated short film for Chobani, directed by Bjørn-Erik Aschim, score by Joe Hisaishi, released July 13. https://thelinestudio.com/work/chobani.

Olivia, of Land of Masks and Jewels. 2014. Tumblr post proposing the solarpunk aesthetic, August 10; credited by Flynn 2014 as "Olivia/Land of Masks and Jewels." https://missolivialouise.tumblr.com/post/94374063675/.

Republic of the Bees. 2008. From Steampunk to Solarpunk. Anonymous blog post, May 27. https://republicofthebees.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/from-steampunk-to-solarpunk/.

Slrpnk.net. 2026. Site statistics from the public Lemmy API, retrieved July 22, 2026: 2,414 registered users, 375 active in the prior month. Instance founded March 2022. https://slrpnk.net.

The Solarpunk Community. 2019. A Solarpunk Manifesto. re-des.org, archived from October 2019; the current page carries a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. https://re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/.

Solarpunk Magazine. 2026. Publishing since 2022 under the motto "Demand Utopia"; issue 28 current as of July 2026. https://solarpunkmagazine.com.

Toki Pona. n.d. Toki Pona and Esperanto: Two friendly world languages. tokipona.org. https://tokipona.org/two_conlangs.

Waffle To The Left. 2021. 'Dear Alice' Decommodified Edition | Solarpunk anime ambience with no ads. YouTube, October 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U.

Zamenhof, L. L. 1907. Speech at the Third World Esperanto Congress, Cambridge, August. In Originala Verkaro, edited by Johannes Dietterle. The Boulogne declaration of 1905 is cited from the same collection.

Phi sources

The manifesto translation quoted and described here is texts/solarpunk_manifesto.md, with its preserved English witness in texts/sources/solarpunk_manifesto.txt and its share-alike license exception recorded in the repository's LICENSE. The five pillars are documented in manual/part2_soul/ch03_five_pillars/, with the solarpunk pillar's roof, garden, and nuri in 01_solarpunk_values.md. The sun stations and the exchange refusal are chapter 2's ground, from canon's natural-clock and refusal rulings; sileta thorui, the sun's beginning, is in the compound registry, manual/part7_reference/compounds.md. The steward and garden-tender block is quoted from proposition 21 of the shelf translation.