Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh was an American linguist who developed lexicostatistics and glottochronology, methods for estimating how closely related languages are and how long ago they diverged from a common ancestor by comparing rates of change in a fixed list of common, culturally basic vocabulary items. Swadesh compiled what is now called the Swadesh list, a standardized set of roughly one hundred to two hundred core vocabulary items, such as words for body parts, natural phenomena and basic actions, chosen because they were assumed to be resistant to borrowing and to change at a roughly comparable rate across languages, making the list a widely used tool for comparative and historical linguistic research even where it has since been criticized and refined. Swadesh carried out extensive fieldwork documenting Indigenous languages of North America, contributing significantly to the descriptive record of languages that were already endangered during his career. Swadesh's academic career was disrupted for a period by the political pressures of McCarthyism in the United States, after which he continued much of his research work in Mexico.