; cougar exhibit,
Navajo Nation Zoo; shopping center near
Navajo, New Mexico; notice of reserved parking,
Window Rock The Apachean languages, of which Navajo is one, are thought to have arrived in the American Southwest from the north by 1500, probably passing through Alberta and Wyoming. Archaeological finds considered to be proto-Navajo have been located in far northern New Mexico around the La Plata, Animas and Pine rivers, dating to around 1500. In 1936, linguist
Edward Sapir showed how the arrival of the Navajo people in the new arid climate among the corn agriculturalists of the Pueblo area was reflected in their language by tracing the changing meanings of words from Proto-Athabaskan to Navajo. For example, the word , which in Proto-Athabaskan meant "horn" and "dipper made from animal horn", in Navajo became , which meant "gourd" or "dipper made from gourd". Likewise, the Proto-Athabaskan word "snow lies on the ground" in Navajo became "snow". Similarly, the Navajo word for "corn" is , derived from two Proto-Athabaskan roots meaning "enemy" and "food", suggesting that the Navajo originally considered corn to be "food of the enemy" when they first arrived among the Pueblo people.
Navajo Code Talkers , Saipan, June 1944|alt=Navajo code talkers 's recommendation letter for Navajo to be used by
code talkers during
World War II During World Wars I and II, the U.S. government employed speakers of the Navajo language as
Navajo code talkers. These Navajo soldiers and sailors used a code based on the Navajo language to relay secret messages. At the end of the war the code remained unbroken. The code used Navajo words for each letter of the English alphabet. Messages could be encoded and decoded by using a
simple substitution cipher where the
ciphertext was the Navajo word. Type two code was informal and directly translated from English into Navajo. If there was no word in Navajo to describe a military word, code talkers used descriptive words. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for
submarine, so they translated it as
iron fish. These Navajo code talkers are widely recognized for their contributions to WWII. Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division Signal Officer stated, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken
Iwo Jima."
Colonization Navajo lands were initially colonized by the
Spanish in the early seventeenth century, shortly after this area was annexed as part of the Spanish viceroyalty of
New Spain. When the United States annexed these territories in 1848 following the
Mexican–American War, Consequently, when these students grew up and had children of their own, they often did not teach them Navajo, in order to prevent them from being punished. In 1943 the men collaborated on
The Navajo Language, a dictionary organized by the roots of the language. By the 1960s, Indigenous languages of the United States had been declining in use for some time. Native American language use began to decline more quickly in this decade as paved roads were built and English-language radio was broadcast to tribal areas. Navajo was no exception, although its large speaker pool—larger than that of any other Native language in the United States—gave it more staying power than most. Adding to the language's decline, federal acts passed in the 1950s to increase educational opportunities for Navajo children had resulted in pervasive use of English in their schools. Near the 1990s, many Navajo children have little to no knowledge in Navajo language, only knowing English.
Revitalization and current status In 1968, U.S. President
Lyndon B. Johnson signed the
Bilingual Education Act, which provided funds for educating young students who are not native English speakers. The Act had mainly been intended for Spanish-speaking children—particularly
Mexican Americans—but it applied to all recognized linguistic minorities. Many Native American tribes seized the chance to establish their own bilingual education programs. However, qualified teachers who were fluent in Native languages were scarce, and these programs were largely unsuccessful. In 1984, to counteract the language's historical decline, the
Navajo Nation Council decreed that the Navajo language would be available and comprehensive for students of all grade levels in schools of the
Navajo Nation. They expanded this work again in 1987, with several significant additions, and this edition continues to be used as an important text. Since 1989,
Diné College, a Navajo tribal
community college, has offered an
associate degree in the subject of Navajo. This program includes language, literature, culture, medical terminology, and teaching courses and produces the highest number of Navajo teachers of any institution in the United States. About 600 students attend per semester. One major university that teaches classes in the Navajo language is
Arizona State University. In 1992, Young and Morgan published another major work on Navajo:
Analytical Lexicon of Navajo, with the assistance of Sally Midgette (Navajo). This work is organized by
root, the basis of Athabaskan languages. An
American Community Survey taken in 2011 found that 169,369 Americans spoke Navajo at home—0.3 percent of Americans whose primary home language was not English. Of primary Navajo speakers, 78.8 percent reported they spoke English "very well", a fairly high percentage overall but less than among other Americans speaking a different Native American language (85.4 percent). Navajo was the only Native American language afforded its own category in the survey; domestic Navajo speakers represented 46.4 percent of all domestic Native language speakers (only 195,407 Americans have a different home Native language). As of July 2014,
Ethnologue classes Navajo as "6b" (In Trouble), signifying that few, but some, parents teach the language to their offspring and that concerted efforts at revitalization could easily protect the language. Navajo had a high population for a language in this category. About half of all Navajo people live on Navajo Nation land, an area spanning parts of
Arizona,
New Mexico, and
Utah; others are dispersed throughout the United States. Under tribal law, fluency in Navajo is mandatory for candidates to the office of the
President of the Navajo Nation. Both original and translated media have been produced in Navajo. The first works tended to be religious texts translated by missionaries, including the Bible. From 1943 to about 1957, the Navajo Agency of the BIA published ("Events"), the first newspaper in Navajo and the only one to be written entirely in Navajo. It was edited by
Robert W. Young and William Morgan, Sr. (Navajo). They had collaborated on
The Navajo Language, a major language dictionary published that same year, and continued to work on studying and documenting the language in major works for the next few decades. Today an
AM radio station,
KTNN, broadcasts in Navajo and English, with programming including music and
NFL games; AM station
KNDN broadcasts only in Navajo. When
Super Bowl XXX was broadcast in Navajo in 1996, it was the first time a
Super Bowl had been carried in a Native American language. In 2013, the 1977 film
Star Wars was translated into Navajo. It was the first major motion picture translated into any Native American language. On October 5, 2018, an early beta of a Navajo course was released on
Duolingo, a popular language learning app. On December 30, 2024, Navajo Nation President
Buu Nygren made Navajo the official language of the
Navajo Nation by signing legislation. He said, “One of my priorities coming in as President has always been to make sure that we make Navajo cool again.” This is in order to promote the intergenerational preservation of the Navajo language within the Navajo Nation and intending to work in conjunction with the Diné Language Teachers Association to foster the utilization of the Navajo language.
Education The Navajo Nation operates , a Navajo language immersion school for grades K-8 in
Fort Defiance, Arizona. Located on the Arizona-New Mexico border in the southeastern quarter of the
Navajo Reservation, the school strives to revitalize Navajo among children of the
Window Rock Unified School District. has thirteen Navajo language teachers who instruct only in the Navajo language, and no English, while five English language teachers instruct in the English language. Kindergarten and first grade are taught completely in the Navajo language, while English is incorporated into the program during third grade, when it is used for about 10% of instruction. In the 2020s, the language nest was established near Albuquerque through a non-profit Diné-led organization. The school also offers classes to parents and family activities revolving around Diné culture. After many Navajo schools were closed during World War II, a program aiming to provide education to Navajo children was funded in the 1950s, where the number of students quickly doubled in the next decade. According to the Navajo Nation Education Policies, the Navajo Tribal Council requests that schools teach both English and Navajo so that the children would remain bilingual, though their influence over the school systems was very low. A small number of preschool programs provide a Navajo-language immersion curriculum, which teaches children basic Navajo vocabulary and grammar under the assumption that they have no prior knowledge in the Navajo language. ==Phonology==