NLTK Swadesh Word Lists

Basic vocabulary lists for 24 languages, derived from the Wiktionary Swadesh list appendix and distributed via NLTK.

Each config is one language; each row is one of the 207 Swadesh concepts.

Languages

Config	Language	Concepts
swadesh-be	Belarusian	207
swadesh-bg	Bulgarian	207
swadesh-bs	Bosnian	207
swadesh-ca	Catalan	207
swadesh-cs	Czech	207
swadesh-cu	Church Slavonic	174
swadesh-de	German	207
swadesh-en	English	207
swadesh-es	Spanish	207
swadesh-fr	French	207
swadesh-hr	Croatian	207
swadesh-it	Italian	207
swadesh-la	Latin	207
swadesh-mk	Macedonian	207
swadesh-nl	Dutch	207
swadesh-pl	Polish	207
swadesh-pt	Portuguese	207
swadesh-ro	Romanian	207
swadesh-ru	Russian	207
swadesh-sk	Slovak	207
swadesh-sl	Slovenian	207
swadesh-sr	Serbian	207
swadesh-sw	Swahili	207
swadesh-uk	Ukrainian	207

Schema

Column	Type	Description
concept_index	int	Swadesh list position (1–207)
word	string	Word/phrase in that language (may contain alternatives)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("nltk-data-hub/swadesh", "swadesh-en")
words = ds["swadesh"]["word"]

Via NLTK

import nltk
nltk.download("words", hf=True)

nltk.corpus.words.words("swadesh-en")  # English Swadesh list
nltk.corpus.words.words("swadesh-de")  # German Swadesh list
nltk.corpus.words.words("swadesh-ru")  # Russian Swadesh list

License

Derived from Wiktionary, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Citation

@misc{swadesh,
  author = {Swadesh, Morris},
  title  = {Swadesh Word Lists},
  note   = {Via Wiktionary Appendix:Swadesh\_list, CC-BY-SA 3.0},
  url    = {https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_list}
}