Kim J. Henriksen
Encyclopedia
Kim Jan Henriksen - is a Danish
Esperantist
singer-musician. From his Polish-born mother Bogumiła Maria Henriksen and Danish-born father Kai L. Henriksen he learned Esperanto
as a child, becoming prominent in the Esperanto youth movement and in the world of Esperanto rock music
in the 1980s and 1990s. Kim Henriksen and his Polish-born wife speak Esperanto at home and are raising their son as a second-generation Esperanto native speaker
. Henriksen's enthusiastic musicianship on behalf of Esperanto and cross-cultural understanding through rock music has earned him popularity both in Europe and America.
Arika Okrent
, who spent five years researching her book on constructed language
s from Klingon
to Esperanto
, bookends a chapter on the growth of the Esperanto language with anecdotal descriptions of the role of Kim Henriksen. In distinguishing the success of Esperanto as the most widely spoken planned language from the cult followings of artificial argot
s like Klingon and from the mixed success of attempts to revive once-declining natural languages like Irish
, she points out the great degree of fluency she observed at international Esperanto congress
es:
Okrent ends the chapter with her description of audience reaction to a song Henriksen still performs but which he wrote when he was still performing with his first band, Amplifiki:
and Micke Englund), which performed throughout Europe in the 1980s. He composed and sang several of the most popular songs of the Esperanto rock music group Sola. A co-founder of the Esperanto Desperado band in 1996, he was a singer, guitar
ist and accordion
ist in this group.
In autumn 2005 he co-founded the Hotel Desperado ensemble with Brian Laustsen, Nis Bramsen and Mark Dziwornu from among the Esperanto Desperado group, a group with which he still performs. Other current band members are Thierry Boisdon and David-Emil Wickström. The band sings songs in several languages — Danish
, English
, French
, Ghanaian
and Spanish
. Their music incorporates elements of flamenco
, afro, blues
, folk
, Balkan
and ska
.
Esperanto Club from 2005 till 2007. He was instrumental in the founding and continued operations of the Sunda esperanto agado, a group that actively aids mutual Øresund-area cooperation among Esperanto clubs from Copenhagen
and Helsingborg
in Denmark
and clubs from Malmö
and Lund
in Sweden
. He has been on the executive of the Esperanto Club of Malmö
since 2007, where he often teaches introductory and intermediate courses in Esperanto.
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
Esperantist
Esperantist
An Esperantist is a person who speaks or uses Esperanto. Etymologically, an Esperantist is someone who hopes...
singer-musician. From his Polish-born mother Bogumiła Maria Henriksen and Danish-born father Kai L. Henriksen he learned Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
as a child, becoming prominent in the Esperanto youth movement and in the world of Esperanto rock music
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
in the 1980s and 1990s. Kim Henriksen and his Polish-born wife speak Esperanto at home and are raising their son as a second-generation Esperanto native speaker
Native Esperanto speakers
Native Esperanto speakers are born into families in which Esperanto is spoken . This usually occurs when the parents meet each other at an Esperanto gathering but do not know each other’s native language...
. Henriksen's enthusiastic musicianship on behalf of Esperanto and cross-cultural understanding through rock music has earned him popularity both in Europe and America.
Arika Okrent's characterization
American linguistLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
Arika Okrent
Arika Okrent
Arika Okrent is an American linguist, known particularly for her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, a result of her five years of research into the topic of constructed...
, who spent five years researching her book on constructed language
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
s from Klingon
Klingon language
The Klingon language is the constructed language spoken by the fictional Klingons in the Star Trek universe....
to Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, bookends a chapter on the growth of the Esperanto language with anecdotal descriptions of the role of Kim Henriksen. In distinguishing the success of Esperanto as the most widely spoken planned language from the cult followings of artificial argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
s like Klingon and from the mixed success of attempts to revive once-declining natural languages like Irish
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
, she points out the great degree of fluency she observed at international Esperanto congress
World Congress of Esperanto
The World Congress of Esperanto has the longest tradition among international Esperanto conventions, with an almost unbroken run of more than a hundred years. The congresses have been held since 1905 every year, except during World Wars I and II...
es:
"[Henriksen] appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. EsperantoEsperantois the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family.
"Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
would have been if both of his parents had been Polish. Kimo didn't choose to learn Esperanto, nor did his son, but everyone else at the conference did. Somewhere along the way they'd decided it worth their time to learn this utopiaUtopiaUtopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n pipe-dream language."
Okrent ends the chapter with her description of audience reaction to a song Henriksen still performs but which he wrote when he was still performing with his first band, Amplifiki:
"Kimo and Jean-Marc [LeClerc] began another song whose tune was unfamiliar to me, an original Esperanto song. Normando ... explained that the song we were hearing is called 'Sola.' People closer to the stage began to sing along, and he said it is often played at youth congresses, where it is a sort of anthem.
"The lyrics tell the story of a young person who feels completely alone, but then goes to an Esperanto congress and feels such friendship and connection to the world that his loneliness leaves him ... until he is back in his own nation in his own little room. 'This song,' he almost whispered, 'is so meaningful for Esperantists. Sometimes, when it's played at the congresses, you see people crying.' "
Henriksen's musical groups
In 1983 he was a co-founder of the Amplifiki group (along with Bertilo WennergrenBertilo Wennergren
Bertilo Wennergren [VEN-er-gren] , born 4 October 1956, is a Swedish Esperantist currently living in Seoul, South Korea...
and Micke Englund), which performed throughout Europe in the 1980s. He composed and sang several of the most popular songs of the Esperanto rock music group Sola. A co-founder of the Esperanto Desperado band in 1996, he was a singer, guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
ist and accordion
Accordion
The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....
ist in this group.
In autumn 2005 he co-founded the Hotel Desperado ensemble with Brian Laustsen, Nis Bramsen and Mark Dziwornu from among the Esperanto Desperado group, a group with which he still performs. Other current band members are Thierry Boisdon and David-Emil Wickström. The band sings songs in several languages — Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Ghanaian
Twi
Asante, or Ashanti, is one of three literary dialects of the Akan language of southern Ghana, and the prestige dialect of that language. It is spoken in and around Kumasi, the capital of the former Ashanti Empire and current subnational Asante Kingdom within Ghana.Along with the Akuapem dialect,...
and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Their music incorporates elements of flamenco
Flamenco
Flamenco is a genre of music and dance which has its foundation in Andalusian music and dance and in whose evolution Andalusian Gypsies played an important part....
, afro, blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, folk
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
, Balkan
Music of Southeastern Europe
The music of Southeastern Europe or Balkan music is a type of music distinct from others in Europe. This is mainly because it was influenced by traditional music of Southeastern European ethnic groups and mutual music influences of these ethnic groups in the period of the Ottoman Empire...
and ska
Ska
Ska |Jamaican]] ) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s, and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues...
.
Esperanto movement role
Henriksen was president of the Danish Esperanto Youth Organization, president of the Danish Esperanto Society from 1995 till 2002 and president of the CopenhagenCopenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
Esperanto Club from 2005 till 2007. He was instrumental in the founding and continued operations of the Sunda esperanto agado, a group that actively aids mutual Øresund-area cooperation among Esperanto clubs from Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
and Helsingborg
Helsingborg
Helsingborg is a city and the seat of Helsingborg Municipality, Skåne County, Sweden with 97,122 inhabitants in 2010. Helsingborg is the centre of an area in the Øresund region of about 320,000 inhabitants in north-west Scania, and is Sweden's closest point to Denmark, with the Danish city...
in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
and clubs from Malmö
Malmö
Malmö , in the southernmost province of Scania, is the third most populous city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg.Malmö is the seat of Malmö Municipality and the capital of Skåne County...
and Lund
Lund
-Main sights:During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the town was the seat of the archbishop, many churches and monasteries were built. At its peak, Lund had 27 churches, but most of them were demolished as result of the Reformation in 1536. Several medieval buildings remain, including Lund...
in Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
. He has been on the executive of the Esperanto Club of Malmö
Malmö
Malmö , in the southernmost province of Scania, is the third most populous city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg.Malmö is the seat of Malmö Municipality and the capital of Skåne County...
since 2007, where he often teaches introductory and intermediate courses in Esperanto.