Navajo

Where it’s spoken

Navajo (Diné Bizaad) is spoken on the Navajo Nation reservation across northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. About 170,000 people speak it, making it the most widely used Native American language north of Mexico. Despite this, Navajo is endangered — younger generations increasingly use English as their first language.

What it sounds like

Navajo is tonal, with high and low pitches that distinguish word meanings. It has glottalized (ejective) consonants — t’, k’, tł’, ts’, ch’, s’ — and a series of glottalized nasal stops unusual outside the Na-Dene family. The language is polysynthetic: verbs incorporate many morphemes encoding subject, object, tense, aspect, mode, and detailed information about the action.

How it’s written

Navajo uses the Latin alphabet with glottal stops (ʼ) and high-tone vowel diacritics. The orthography was developed in the 1930s by Robert W. Young, William Morgan Sr., and Adolph Bittanny based on linguistic principles. Tone-bearing vowels carry acute marks for high tone.

History

Navajo’s role in WWII was legendary — Code Talkers used the language as a cryptographic medium that Axis intelligence services never broke. Navajo Wikipedia, government services, and Sesame Street co-productions show the language’s modern public presence.