Swadesh, Morris (1909–1967)

US linguist. Among the first to develop modern linguistic analysis in the USA, he initiated or was associated with many new approaches such as phonemics, pattern analysis of linguistic structure, and glottochronology. He was especially known for his work on the origin and evolution of language, effectively founding what is known as prehistoric linguistics. He worked for several years to trace the relationships among all American Indian languages.

He was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. A child of immigrant Russian Jews, he grew up knowing Russian and Yiddish. He took his BA and MA at the University of Chicago; Swadesh took his PhD at Yale in 1933. He spent part of every year throughout the 1930s doing fieldwork with American Indians and became familiar with many of their languages. He taught at the University of Wisconsin 1937–39, then went to Mexico to head a program of education for native Mexicans while serving as professor at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional de Mexico 1939–41. During World War II he served in the language section of the US Army 1942–46, and edited dictionaries and teaching materials for several languages. After teaching one year at the City College of New York 1948–49, he was fired due to the McCarthyism that drove out academics with ‘leftist sympathies’ . He returned to Mexico as a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma and at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia 1956–67. He was the author of 22 books and over 130 articles.