Early Life and Education
Swadesh was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia. His parents were multilingual, and Yiddish, some Russian, and English were 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. He followed Sapir to Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. (1933). Inspired by Sapir's early lists of word similarities between Native American languages, he began a life work in comparative linguistics.
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