Per Langgård has occupied himself with Greenlandic all of his adult life since he at the age of 23 in 1972 decided to replace literature with the study of Greenlandic.
He started the study of eskimology at Copenhagen’s university in the summer of 1973. After finishing minor in 1975 he spent a year in a small village in Southern Greenland. Back in Copenhagen he started to teach Greenlandic L2 at the Royal Danish School of Educational Studies. The dissertation from 1979 is about Greenlandic for foreigners.
After a year as a draft resister he returned to the village in Southern Greenland where he worked as a teacher in compulsory school for two years until he in 1983 was transferred to Nuuk when the university forerunner, The Inuit Institute, was founded.
From 1983 til 2000 he held a position as associate professor of Greenlandic at Greenland’s university. During the years at the university his main focus in teaching and research was Greenlandic L1 grammar, Greenlandic literature, and bilingualism with Greenlandic L2 and applied linguistics regularly included. In 1997 he published (in Danish) the pedagogical grammar book and the primer that eventually turned into the present e.learning system.
When the Language Secretariat was founded in 1999 he was transferred to the new institution where he still holds a position as chief advisor having development of a fully-fledged Greenlandic language technology program as his special responsibility.
Per is one of the very few non-Greenlanders with a command of Greenlandic that suffice for practical use in teaching and adminstration. Greenlandic is his working language and he lectures in Greenlandic at the university. He has over the years been a frequent guest in the media.
With such a CV we are sure not to say too much when we claim that the author of Greenlandic for Foreigners is THE grand old man in the field of Greenlandic L2.
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