Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh (January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics.

Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents.

Swadesh was born in 1909 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia.

His parents were multilingual, and he grew up with Yiddish, some Russian, and English as his first languages.

Swadesh earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, where he began studying with the linguist Edward Sapir.

In the 1930s, Swadesh conducted extensive fieldwork on more than 20 indigenous languages of the Americas, with travels in Canada, Mexico, and the US.

He worked most prominently on the Chitimacha language, a now-extinct language isolate found among indigenous people of Louisiana.

His fieldnotes and subsequent publications constitute the main source of information on this extinct language.

He also conducted smaller amounts of fieldwork on the Menominee and Mahican languages, in Wisconsin and New York, respectively; both are part of the Algonquian language family.

He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933.

He followed Sapir to Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1933.

Inspired by Sapir's early lists of word similarities among Native American languages, he began a life work in comparative linguistics.

Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services.

Swadesh taught linguistics and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1937 to 1939.

During this time he devised and organized the highly original Oneida Language and Folklore Project.

This program hired more than a dozen Oneida Indians in Wisconsin for a WPA project (under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration) to record and translate texts in the Oneida language.

In May 1939 Swadesh went to Mexico, where he had been hired to assist the government of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, who was promoting the education of indigenous peoples.

Swadesh learned the Purépecha language for this work.

Together with rural school teachers, Swadesh worked in indigenous villages, teaching people to read first in their own languages, before teaching them Spanish.

He worked with the Tarahumara, Purépecha, and Otomi peoples.

Swadesh also learned Spanish in less than a year; he was fluent enough that he was able to give a series of linguistics lectures (in Spanish) at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and publish his first book, La Nueva Filologia, in Spanish in 1941.

Returning to the U.S., during the Second World War Swadesh worked on military projects for the U.S. Army and the OSS to compile reference materials on Burmese, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

He also wrote easy-to-learn textbooks for troops to learn Russian and Chinese.

Swadesh served in Burma, where Lt. Roger Hilsman described his linguistic skills as extraordinary.

Swadesh learned enough of the Naga language, after spending only one day with a local guide, that he was able to give a ten-minute thank-you speech in that language.

Hilsman recalled that Swadesh had been strongly opposed to racial segregation in the United States.

He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party.

He spent most of the rest of his life teaching in Mexico and Canada.

Swadesh had a particular interest in the indigenous languages of the Americas, and conducted extensive fieldwork throughout North America.

He was one of the pioneers of glottochronology and lexicostatistics, and is known for his creation of the Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts believed to present across cultures and thus suitable for cross-linguistic comparison.

Swadesh believed that his techniques could discover deep relationships between apparently unrelated languages, thus allowing for the identification of macrofamilies and possibly even a "Proto-Human" language.

His theories were often controversial, and some have been deprecated by later linguists.

In May 1949, Swadesh was fired by the City College of New York (CCNY) due to accusations that he was a Communist.

That was during the Red Scare, and he was one of a number of anthropologists and other academics to be deprived of their employment during the McCarthy Era.

Swadesh had been a member of the Denver Communist Party and was active in the protest movement against the execution of convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Swadesh continued to work in the United States until 1954, aided by limited funding from the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia.

(The Oneida were historically one of the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, with their historic territory located in central New York state, but some had moved to Wisconsin in the 19th century.) In this same period in other WPA projects, writers were recording state histories and guides, and researchers were collecting oral histories of African Americans who had been born into slavery before the end of the Civil War.

Swadesh was let go by the University of Wisconsin just as he was to begin the project.

Floyd Lounsbury, then an undergraduate, was assigned to finish it.

Lounsbury continued his studies in linguistics, later serving as Sterling Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Yale University.