Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh (/ˈswɑːdɛʃ/; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas. In Europe there was a very clear example of language change over centuries: the shift from Latin to the Romance languages (such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish) that occurred in Europe in fewer than 2000 years. And because these languages were written, it was relatively easy for scholars to gauge the rate of change. Swadesh believed language change to be a basic principle that could be applied to all languages. He spent much of his life comparing hundreds of indigenous languages of the Americas and mapping their relatedness.

In the early 19th century, linguists began to comprehend the relatedness of the larger Indo-European family of languages. By the end of the century, linguists were using these principles to identify word similarities and propose language families among the indigenous languages of the Americas. In the 1930s, Swadesh was part of a new generation of linguists developing these insights in greater depth.

In the late 1930s Swadesh worked in Mexico with the government as it tried to preserve some of the indigenous languages of Mexico. After the U.S. entered World War II, he returned the U.S. and worked on military projects for the U.S. Army and the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.

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