language has linguistic relatives both near and far, from Chiricahua and Mescalero in the Southwest to Gwichâin, Tanacross, and nine other languages in Alaska. The vast majority of these languages are severely endangered or extinct. A fewânotably North and South Slavey, Dogrib, and Dene Suline in northern Canadaâhave speaker populations in the low four figures. Navajo, on the other hand, has more than 150,000 speakers and is spoken not only by more people than any other Native language in the United States, but by more people than all the other Native U.S. languages combined.
I wanted to know what it would be like to visit such a strong and vibrant Native language community. Would it feel like walking into another country? Would English be abruptly replaced with a panoply of new and unfamiliar sounds? Or would it feel like one of the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City, where outsiders are greeted in English but discussed sotto voce in a different tongue? Navajo Nation, I knew, was my best opportunity to experience a Native language not yet on the verge of extinction. So I drove to Arizona, turning northwest at Flagstaff and heading up toward Tuba City and, ultimately, a town called Chinle.
If youâre interested in tackling an indigenous American language on your own, Navajo is in many ways your best bet. The sheer size of the Navajo-speaking population has helped Navajo become one of the more abundantly studied and documented Native languages, and there are plenty of language materials to be found even if youâre not fond of specialty stores or the dustier corners of libraries. That being said, it isnât exactly what I would call the most accessible of languages.
Given how monstrously subjective such an assessment is, I generally try to avoid labeling languages as âdifficultâ or âeasy.â One manâs Chinese, after all, is another manâs Pig Latin. But I feel comfortable saying that the vast majority of us would consider Navajo to be something of a challenge. I certainly know that when Iâm reading about Navajo, I frequently feel like my brain is on sabbatical. Just now, for instance, I was going through a paper suggesting that Navajo transitive verbs encapsulate a sort of relativistic frame of reference. I really wanted to figure out what was going on. I was all set to quote Einstein and work into these pages some pointed commentary about translation and cross-cultural difference and maybe even the twin paradox. But try as I might, I couldnât make sense of it.
Fortunately, however, Navajo is such a fascinating language that even the easier stuff is really interesting. Take Navajo verbs, for instance. In English, we encode information about subject and aspect and tense in our verbs with inflection, and with some exceptions these inflections usually take the form of verb endings. The most obvious difference between the English and Navajo verb is that Navajoâand most other Athabaskan languagesâprimarily uses verbal prefixes to add or change information communicated by the verb.
And itâs not just a matter of slapping on an -ed (or, in this case, an ed- ) to let people know that things happened in the past. Navajo verb stems can take a number of different prefixes at once, prefixes that indicate not only subject, aspect, and mode but also object, type of object, and various adverbial functions. Linguists call this kind of morphology a slot-and-filler template, which basically means that you can treat Navajo verbs a bit like a row in a game of Connect Four: first you drop a verb stem in on the far right, and then you slide various prefixes into their respective columns until you have a complete verb.
To give you a better idea of how this works in practice, hereâs a standard Navajo verb template, as compiled by the linguists Robert Young and William Morgan:
Now, every verb doesnât take every prefix, so this is something of an
I wanted to know what it would be like to visit such a strong and vibrant Native language community. Would it feel like walking into another country? Would English be abruptly replaced with a panoply of new and unfamiliar sounds? Or would it feel like one of the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City, where outsiders are greeted in English but discussed sotto voce in a different tongue? Navajo Nation, I knew, was my best opportunity to experience a Native language not yet on the verge of extinction. So I drove to Arizona, turning northwest at Flagstaff and heading up toward Tuba City and, ultimately, a town called Chinle.
If youâre interested in tackling an indigenous American language on your own, Navajo is in many ways your best bet. The sheer size of the Navajo-speaking population has helped Navajo become one of the more abundantly studied and documented Native languages, and there are plenty of language materials to be found even if youâre not fond of specialty stores or the dustier corners of libraries. That being said, it isnât exactly what I would call the most accessible of languages.
Given how monstrously subjective such an assessment is, I generally try to avoid labeling languages as âdifficultâ or âeasy.â One manâs Chinese, after all, is another manâs Pig Latin. But I feel comfortable saying that the vast majority of us would consider Navajo to be something of a challenge. I certainly know that when Iâm reading about Navajo, I frequently feel like my brain is on sabbatical. Just now, for instance, I was going through a paper suggesting that Navajo transitive verbs encapsulate a sort of relativistic frame of reference. I really wanted to figure out what was going on. I was all set to quote Einstein and work into these pages some pointed commentary about translation and cross-cultural difference and maybe even the twin paradox. But try as I might, I couldnât make sense of it.
Fortunately, however, Navajo is such a fascinating language that even the easier stuff is really interesting. Take Navajo verbs, for instance. In English, we encode information about subject and aspect and tense in our verbs with inflection, and with some exceptions these inflections usually take the form of verb endings. The most obvious difference between the English and Navajo verb is that Navajoâand most other Athabaskan languagesâprimarily uses verbal prefixes to add or change information communicated by the verb.
And itâs not just a matter of slapping on an -ed (or, in this case, an ed- ) to let people know that things happened in the past. Navajo verb stems can take a number of different prefixes at once, prefixes that indicate not only subject, aspect, and mode but also object, type of object, and various adverbial functions. Linguists call this kind of morphology a slot-and-filler template, which basically means that you can treat Navajo verbs a bit like a row in a game of Connect Four: first you drop a verb stem in on the far right, and then you slide various prefixes into their respective columns until you have a complete verb.
To give you a better idea of how this works in practice, hereâs a standard Navajo verb template, as compiled by the linguists Robert Young and William Morgan:
Now, every verb doesnât take every prefix, so this is something of an
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