What is the native Navajo language?
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Navajo Indian Language (Dine) Navajo (known to its own speakers as Diné) is an Athabaskan language of the American Southwest. Nearly 150,000 Navajo Indians speak their native language today, making it the most-spoken Native American language in the United States.
Navajo is most closely related to Western Apache, with which it shares a similar tonal scheme and more than 92 percent of its vocabulary. It is estimated that the Apachean linguistic groups separated and became established as distinct societies, of which the Navajo were one, somewhere between 1300 and 1525.
Why is the Navajo language important?
During World War II, the Navajo language entered the national and international spotlight. Navajo code talkers were employed by the United States government to encode, transmit and decode messages. This language was ideal for use as a code that the enemy just couldn’t crack.
What language did the Navajo code talkers speak?
Marine Corps leadership selected 29 Navajo men, the Navajo Code Talkers, who created a code based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.
The Navajo are known for their woven rugs and blankets. They first learned to weave cotton from the Pueblo peoples. When they started to raise sheep they switched to wool. For this reason they were often called Chief’s Blankets.
Navajo was an unwritten language prior to the middle of the 19th century. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, a number of religious texts, grammars, and dictionaries were compiled by missionaries, each of whom used a different writing system.
How does the Navajo language pronunciation work?
They are pronounced just like oral (“regular”) vowels, only using your nose as well as your mouth. To English speakers, a nasal vowel often sounds like a vowel with a half-pronounced “n” at the end of it.
How is Navajo different from other languages?
Navajo is nothing like English or any European language. Navajo has a large number of sounds that English does not have. It has tones like Chinese or Vietnamese. It has high, low, rising, and falling. It has glottalized consonants as well as many of the more familiar consonants.
The Navajo language has a large phoneme inventory which includes uncommon consonants that are not in the English language. It is a tonal language with three tones of high, rising, and falling. It has four basic vowels.
Only one Navajo word has been fully absorbed into the English language: hogan (from Navajo hooghan) – a term referring to the traditional houses. Another word with limited English recognition is chindi (an evil spirit of the deceased). [91]
What percentage of Navajo students are bilingual?
However, data collected in 1980 showed that 85 percent of Navajo first-graders were bilingual, compared to 62 percent of Navajo of all ages—early evidence of a resurgence of use of their traditional language among younger people.