Navajo or Navaho ( ; or ) 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.
Nomenclature The word Navajo is an exonym: it comes from the Tewa word , which combines the forms ('field') and ('valley') to mean 'farm fields adjoining a valley'. It was borrowed into Spanish to refer to an area of present-day northwestern New Mexico, and later into English for the Navajo tribe and their language. The alternative spelling Navaho is considered antiquated; even the anthropologist Berard Haile spelled it with a "j" despite his personal objections. The Navajo refer to themselves as the ('People'), with their language known (its endonym) as ('People's language') or .
Classification Navajo is an Athabaskan language; Navajo and Apache languages make up the southernmost branch of the family. Most of the other Athabaskan languages are located in Alaska, northwestern Canada, and along the North American Pacific coast.
Most languages in the Athabaskan family have tones. However, this feature is believed to have evolved independently in all subgroups as the reconstructed Proto-Athabaskan language had no tones. In each case, tone evolved from glottalic consonants at the ends of morphemes; however, the progression of these consonants into tones has not been consistent, with some related morphemes being pronounced with high tones in some Athabaskan languages and low tones in others. It has been posited that Navajo and Chipewyan, which have no common ancestor more recent than Proto-Athabaskan and possess many pairs of corresponding but opposite tones, evolved from different dialects of Proto-Athabaskan that pronounced these glottalic consonants differently. Proto-Athabaskan diverged fully into separate languages .
Navajo is most closely related to Western Apache, with which it shares a similar tonal scheme and more than 92 percent of its vocabulary, and to Chiricahua-Mescalero Apache. It is estimated that the Apachean linguistic groups separated and became established as distinct societies, of which the Navajo were one, somewhere between 1300 and 1525. Navajo is generally considered mutually intelligible with all other Apachean languages.
History
The Apachean languages, including Navajo, are thought to have arrived in the American Southwest from the north by 1500, as various peoples migrated through Alberta and Wyoming. Archaeological finds considered indicative of 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.Sapir, E. (1936). "Internal linguistic evidence suggestive of the northern origin of the Navaho". American Anthropologist, 38(2), 224–235.Shaul, D. L. (2014). A Prehistory of Western North America: The Impact of Uto-Aztecan Languages. UNM Press.
Navajo Code Talkers
During World Wars I and II, the U.S. government employed speakers of the Navajo language as Navajo code talkers to relay sensitive information that must remain secret.
The Navajo language was used for military codes for several reasons: it had a relatively large pool of speakers who could serve in the US military, but was not well-known to outsiders other than small numbers of academics and missionaries (~30), and is a very complex language with several dialects. Navajo Code Talkers could also generate coded messages much faster than other methods. 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 Modern-day Navajo lands were occupied by Indigenous groups termed Ancestral Puebloans until about 1300 CE, and later the Ute and Piute peoples starting circa 1150–1300 AD. Navajo and other Athabaskan speakers migrated to the region in several waves starting circa 1400 CE if not slightly earlier. There is significant debate about timelines and other details, but evidence shows violent hostility and competition within and between these groups.Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, University of Utah Press, 1999. [Corn]Ambler, J. R., & Sutton, M. Q. (1989). The Anasazi Abandonment of the San Juan Drainage and the Numic Expansion. North American Archaeologist, 10(1), 39-53.Janetski, Joel. “The Stable- and Radio-Isotope Chemistry of Western Basketmaker Burials: Implications for Early Puebloan Diets and Origins.” American Antiquity, 2007.Martin, Debra L. Hard Times in Dry Lands: Making Meaning of Violence in the Ancient Southwest. Journal of Anthropological Research, Volume 72, Number 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/685281 Various forms of slavery or servitude were widely practiced by Najavo peoples before European contact, most commonly of women and children, and ranging from adoption into kinship networks to coerced labor and enslavement.Little, Ann, 'Native American Captivity and Slavery in North America, 1492–1848' (24 Feb. 2022), in Jane Dailey (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York, NY, online edn, Oxford Academic, 15 Sept. 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.980, accessed 29 Aug. 2026.Donald L. Slavery in Indigenous North America. In: Eltis D, Engerman SL, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Cambridge University Press; 2011:217-247.
First colonization by European forces of Navajo territory began with the Spanish Empire in the early seventeenth century, shortly after this area was annexed as part of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain. After Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, most Navajo territory was under Mexican control.
When the United States annexed these territories in 1848 following the Mexican–American War, the English-speaking settlers allowed Navajo children to attend their schools. In some cases, the United States established separate schools for Navajo and other Native American children. In the late 19th century, it founded boarding schools, often operated by religious missionary groups. In efforts to acculturate the children, school authorities insisted that they learn to speak English and practice Christianity. Students routinely had their mouths washed out with lye soap as a punishment if they did speak Navajo. 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.
Robert W. Young and William Morgan, who both worked for the Navajo Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, developed and published a practical orthography in 1937. It helped spread education among Navajo speakers. In 1943 the men collaborated on The Navajo Language, a dictionary organized by the roots of the language. In World War II, the United States military used speakers of Navajo as code talkers—to transmit top-secret military messages over telephone and radio in a code based on Navajo. The language was considered ideal because of its grammar, which differs strongly from that of German and Japanese, and because no published Navajo dictionaries existed at the time.
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.
In more recent years, the number of monolingual Navajo speakers have been declining, and most younger Navajo people are bilingual. 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.