diff --git a/fastembed/sparse/utils/tokenizer.py b/fastembed/sparse/utils/tokenizer.py
index 1ba2be82..88b6c059 100644
--- a/fastembed/sparse/utils/tokenizer.py
+++ b/fastembed/sparse/utils/tokenizer.py
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 
 
 class SimpleTokenizer:
-    def tokenize(text: str) -> list[str]:
+    def tokenize(text: str) -> List[str]:
         text = re.sub(r"[^\w]", " ", text.lower())
         text = re.sub(r"\s+", " ", text)