![]() ![]() Like many other Athabaskan languages, Navajo has tones. Other Athabaskan languages are spoken in Alaska and on the Pacific coast. Navajo is one of the most southernmost Athabaskan languages. For example, English is part of the Indo-European language family because it has a lot of similarities with languages spoken in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. A language family is a group of languages that are related to each other and come from a common ancestor language. Navajo is part of the Athabaskan language family. They also call their language Naabeehó bizaad, which is based on the word "Navajo."Ĭlassification The Navajo call themselves Diné, which means "people." They call their language Diné bizaad ("people's language). That Spanish word then was used in English to refer to the Navajo people, who live in New Mexico. That Tewa word eventually made it into the Spanish language, where it referred to an area in New Mexico. The Tewa are another group of Native Americans and speak their own language. The Navajo do not call themselves or their language "Navajo." The word "Navajo" is from the Tewa word Navahu, which means "large field" ( nava "field" + hu "valley"). ![]() Before this, the Navajo did not have their own alphabet. The current alphabet was developed in the 1930s. The Navajo language is written with the Latin alphabet, just like English. Navajo does not have a lot of loanwords from other languages. In Navajo, sentences are arranged as subject-object-verb although they can be arranged in other ways too. These prefixes and suffixes add meaning, such as tense, who is doing the action, and so on. In Navajo, new words are made by adding prefixes and suffixes to a part of a word called the stem. For these reasons and many more, many English speakers find it difficult to learn Navajo. ![]() Navajo is also a tonal language, like Chinese, which means that pitch is used to make words different from each other. Navajo is famous for being used by the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II (Pacific Theater).Ĭompared to many other languages, the Navajo language has a lot of sounds, including many that are not found in the English language. In 2011, almost 170,000 Americans spoke Navajo at home. It is the most widely spoken Native American language in the US and the most spoken Indigenous language in the Americas north of the US-Mexico border. The Navajo language (Navajo: Diné Bizaad) is a Southern Athabaskan language that is spoken in the United States, specifically in the Navajo Nation (in the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. The Navajo Nation, where the language is most spoken ![]()
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