MAKING LANGUAGES
For polyglot and amateur linguist Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets languages are beautiful complex cathedrals with fascinating structures. As long as he lives, language has had a special place in his heart. So it isn’t very strange that he started the construction of his own cathedrals in the shape of new, inventive languages.
When he – still in primary school – wrote down the first grammatical rules of a new language, Christophe could never have thought that he would one day be chairman of the Language Creation Society. In that capacity he now supports other language creators and helps them to promote the fairly unknown, but stimulating craftsmanship of making new languages to the general public, as an of art form.
Born in Normandy, he moved to The Hague in 2001, and a few years later to the city of Assen, where he now lives. In addition to everything that has to do with language, Christophe enjoys Japanese animé, live-action series on TV, reading science fiction – and fantasy books, and he is very enthusiastic about hard science, in particular astrophysics and quantum dynamics.
Grandsire-Koevoets considers language as the shadow of our brain and the reflection of our identity. Our language, our dialect and accent are a part of who we are, and tell people where we come from. Therefore, creating a new, personal language is a way to change ourselves and to adopt a new identity.
Christophe showed us that the creation of a language is nothing more than a simple extension of the linguistic creativity we all possess.