Una Canger

Who is Una Canger?

Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement.

Daughter of the famous Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen, she was admitted as the first female student in the department of Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, where she became interested the theories of Louis Hjelmslev. Later she received her PhD from Berkeley in 1968, her thesis being a glossematic grammar of the Mayan language Mam. She worked with Mayan languages for a while, particularly Mam, Teco, and Lacandón. After being offered a position at the University of Copenhagen, she began studying Classical Nahuatl, leading to her later descriptive and dialectological work on modern Nahuatl.