High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A Swadesh list is a compilation of concepts for which words are deemed to exist in the largest number of languages. Translations of a Swadesh list into a set of languages allows researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. Swadesh lists are named after the U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh. They are used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence).