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This is the personal website of Magnus Pharao Hansen, PhD.

I am an anthropologist and linguist, and Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Since 2024 I have been Principal Investigator of SUAHIST, a project on the deep history of the Southern Uto-Aztecan languages, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.

Here you can find my current projects — SUAHIST and Nahuatl Space — along with my CV, my publications, and my blog about the Nahuatl language.

My work has three main foci:

1. The politics of language. The relationship between the political situation of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and the revitalization of endangered minority languages. I approach this ethnographically, but also through ethnohistorical study of how glottopolitical contexts change over time. This research resulted in the book Nahuatl Nations: Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in Indigenous Mexico, published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

2. The history of languages and language families in Mesoamerica and northwestern Mexico. How the languages of the region spread, and how they influenced one another before and after European colonization. This is the subject of SUAHIST, which combines the comparative method with lexicostatistical and phylogeographic approaches, and with the comparative study of mythological narrative. Related work includes a 2025 article with Christophe Helmke in Current Anthropology arguing that the writing system of Teotihuacan recorded a Nahuan language.

3. Language and landscape. How languages reflect the ways their speakers perceive and move through the physical world, and whether grammatical differences in the construction of space are shaped by differences in landscape. This is the subject of Nahuatl Space, which grew out of my Sapere Aude project on spatial grammar across dialects of Nahuatl.

Primary fields of research

  • Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics: Nahuan, Corachol, comparative reconstruction
  • Nahuatl dialectology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics
  • Language documentation: Wixárika, Náayeri, Nahuatl
  • Revitalization of endangered languages; language policy and education
  • Indigenous politics, rights and self-determination in Mexico
  • Mesoamerican ethnohistory, writing systems and decipherment
  • Comparative mythology and narrative
  • Semiotics, space, and language and worldview

Outside work I play music, read widely, and write. I have a long-standing fondness for historical figures — Tycho Brahe, Champollion — who combined adventure, systematic observation and intuitive, abductive thinking.