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Navajo

Navajo

Summary

Navajo is spoken by about 170,000 people, primarily among the Navajo Nation in the southwestern United States. Belonging to the Na-Dené language family, Navajo uses the Latin alphabet and is agglutinative, featuring a tonal system with two tones. With its SOV word order and complex verb morphology, Navajo has played a key role in cultural preservation and was famously used as a code language during World War II by Navajo Code Talkers.

Stats

  • Language Family: Na-Dené

  • Writing System: Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: 2

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 0

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: None

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 5

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 16

  • Number of Consonants: 28

Areas Where Spoken

  • USA (0.05%) (170 k)

Resources

Mass Resource List

Books

Lessons

YouTube Videos

Websites

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