Athabaskan language of Na-Dené stock in the United States
Navajo
Diné bizaad
Native to
United States
Region
Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado
Ethnicity
332,129 Navajo (2021)
Native speakers
170,000 (2019 census)[1]
Language family
Dené–Yeniseian?
Na-Dené
Athabaskan
Southern Athabaskan
Southwestern Apache
Western
Navajo
Writing system
Latin (Navajo alphabet) Navajo Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-1
nv
ISO 639-2
nav
ISO 639-3
nav
Glottolog
nava1243
ELP
Diné Bizaad (Navajo)
The Navajo Nation, where the language is most spoken
Navajo is classified as Vulnerable by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
Navajo or Navaho (/ˈnævəhoʊ,ˈnɑːvə-/NAV-ə-hoh, NAH-və-;[2] Navajo: Diné bizaad[tìnépìz̥ɑ̀ːt] or Naabeehó bizaad[nɑ̀ːpèːhópìz̥ɑ̀ːt]) is a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family, through which it is related to languages spoken across the western areas of North America. Navajo is spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States, especially in the Navajo Nation. It is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages and is the most widely spoken north of the Mexico–United States border, with almost 170,000 Americans speaking Navajo at home as of 2011.
The language has struggled to keep a healthy speaker base, although this problem has been alleviated to some extent by extensive education programs in the Navajo Nation. In World War II, speakers of the Navajo language joined the military and developed a code for sending secret messages. These code talkers' messages are widely credited with saving many lives and winning some of the most decisive battles in the war.
Navajo has a fairly large phonemic inventory, including several consonants that are not found in English. Its four basic vowel qualities are distinguished for nasality, length, and tone. Navajo has both agglutinative and fusional elements: it uses affixes to modify verbs, and nouns are typically created from multiple morphemes, but in both cases these morphemes are fused irregularly and beyond easy recognition. Basic word order is subject–object–verb, though it is highly flexible to pragmatic factors. Verbs are conjugated for aspect and mood, and given affixes for the person and number of both subjects and objects, as well as a host of other variables.
The language's orthography, which was developed in the late 1930s, is based on the Latin script. Most Navajo vocabulary is Athabaskan in origin, as the language has been conservative with loanwords due to its highly complex noun morphology.
^Navajo at Ethnologue (24th ed., 2021)
^Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917], Peter Roach; James Hartmann; Jane Setter (eds.), English Pronouncing Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 3-12-539683-2
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