Marc Leland Greenberg was born on November 9, 1961, in the
Hollywood neighborhood of
Los Angeles, the son of a furniture store owner. The family has long-standing roots in the city;
his grandfather was a
news reporter covering the police in the 1920s. His great-grandparents, many of whom lived well into his adulthood, were from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary, and spoke both
Yiddish and the languages of their respective native countries. Shortly after Greenberg's birth, the family moved to
Whittier, California, where his brother Phillip was born in 1963. The family then moved to
West Los Angeles five years later. Growing up in a city he has described as defaulting to "an ahistorical, monocultural, future-oriented, materialistic culture of vanity and self-indulgence", Greenberg viewed linguistics as an opportunity for personal "reinvention" from that norm. Unable to travel, he engaged his interest in languages through
stamp collecting, remarking that the diversity of languages he found on the stamps helped to break up "monotonous Californian life". He and a neighborhood friend listened to foreign radio stations, and Greenberg used the more multicultural neighborhood of West Los Angeles to try and teach himself German and Russian. Greenberg first received his bachelor's degree in
Russian literature in 1983 from the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating . There, he learned Russian, Czech, and
Serbo-Croatian. He received his
master's degree in comparative Slavic linguistics the following year from the
University of Chicago and returned to UCLA to complete his
doctorate, focusing on
Slavic historical accentology and
dialectology. There, he studied under
Henrik Birnbaum,
Pavle Ivić, , and
Alan Timberlake. Ivić directed Greenberg to the work of the Dutch linguist , who had done substantial dialectology work in
Yugoslavia, and Vermeer began mentoring Greenberg on his linguistic
fieldwork in Slovene. During the 1980s, Greenberg traveled across
Eastern Europe, studying in
Communist Russia,
Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary. His first trip, in 1982, was to
Leningrad State University, followed by
Charles University the following year, where he met his future wife Marta, a Slovene. After he was given a
Fulbright fellowship in 1987, Greenberg traveled to Amsterdam, staying with Vermeer shortly before moving on to Yugoslavia. Greenberg later described the stay as "formative", believing he "had found his tribe" when Vermeer informed him that historical-comparative dialectologists were "the lunatic fringe" of Slavistics. With an additional grant from the
United States Department of Education, Greenberg completed fieldwork for his
dissertation in Yugoslavia between 1988 and 1990. His thesis,
A Historical Analysis of the Phonology and Accentuation of the Prekmurje Dialect of Slovene, earned him his doctorate in 1990. When
Slovenia declared its independence, Greenberg advocated for its recognition in the United States. ==Career==