Talk:Navajo language

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Monolinguals
I found it a bit remarkable that there are several thousand monolingual Navajo speakers in the US. It makes sense for immigrant groups like Russians or Chinese, but not so much for native US languages (unless there's Spanish involved of course). There is a rather odd contradiction in the source, though. In the table on page 3, 2.2% stated that the speak English "not at all", but the percentage that reported speaking a "language other than English at home" was 0.3%.

Even if the percentage is calculated from the total number of self-reported speakers, it doesn't seem to add up. So where does the figure of 7,600 come from?

Peter Isotalo 03:25, 2 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I think it means that the 169,369 Navajo speakers make up 0.3% of the 60,577,020 people who speak a language other than English at home. And 2.2% of those 169,369 speak no English, and 4,8 speak little Enlgish. I dont think it is weird at all that there are monolingual speakers of indigenous languages in the US, and I dont know why you would think so. If anything people on the Navajo reservation live a lot more isolated from the English speaking majority than Chinese or Russians in New York.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 19:30, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 10 October 2016
Because the IPA does not use acute accents to represent tonal distinctions in vowels, I request that, starting at the beginning of the paragraph before the "Navajo Orthography" and ending at the following "Sample text" heading, someone please replace this source:

Navajo represents nasalized vowels with an ogonek ( ˛ ), sometimes described as a reverse cedilla; and represents the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (//) with a barred L (capital Ł, lowercase ł). The ogonek and the barred L were imported from Polish, while the use of an acute accent for vowels with a high tone was taken from French.

==Sample text==

With this source:

Navajo represents nasalized vowels with an ogonek ( ˛ ), sometimes described as a reverse cedilla; and represents the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (//) with a barred L (capital Ł, lowercase ł). The ogonek and the barred L were imported from Polish, while the use of an acute accent for vowels with a high tone was taken from French.

==Sample text==

Thank you.

173.160.70.89 (talk) 05:20, 10 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the template.   Paine   u/ c  22:48, 11 October 2016 (UTC)


 * The original table is much easier to understand. The IP's suggestion is bewildering. The original one could use some adjusting, however. Compare with wikt:Appendix:Navajo alphabet. —Stephen (talk) 11:03, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 11 June 2017
Please add a link to the Wikipedia article on "Athabaskan languages" where "Athabaskan" is mentioned in the "Navajo language" article. 88.173.59.97 (talk) 20:33, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Padlock-silver-open.svg Not done: The page's protection level has changed since this request was placed. You should now be able to edit the page yourself. If you still seem to be unable to, please reopen the request with further details. Izno (talk) 12:47, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050321120631/http://library.thinkquest.org/J002073F/thinkquest/Language.htm to http://library.thinkquest.org/J002073F/thinkquest/Language.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080709030512/http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007September/webster.htm to http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007September/webster.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120312065350/http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/linguistica/congresso/1/txnavar.pdf to http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/linguistica/congresso/1/txnavar.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150823194811/http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/linguistica/congresso/1/txnavtsl.pdf to http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/linguistica/congresso/1/txnavtsl.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120703222655/http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~carlota/papers/Nphon.pdf to http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~carlota/papers/Nphon.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121212023309/http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/Chee%20et%20al_vol15.pdf to http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/Chee%20et%20al_vol15.pdf
 * Added tag to https://urresearch.rochester.edu/retrieve/6548/BLS+McD%26Suss.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120307084257/http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/cls/f2000n2/mcdonough.pdf to http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/cls/f2000n2/mcdonough.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054057/http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~carlota/papers/Time%20in%20Navajo.pdf to http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~carlota/papers/Time%20in%20Navajo.pdf

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Any speakers?
Could use input here: Talk:Nádleehi. Thanks. - CorbieV  ☊ ☼ 22:50, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Unclear
The second paragraph of § Revitalization and current status contains the sentence
 * In 1980 they published a monumental expansion of their work on the language, organized by word (first initial of vowel or consonant) in the pattern of English dictionaries, as requested by Navajo students.

What does "first initial of vowel or consonant" mean? First and initial are synonymous. A word's or syllable's initial phoneme (in speech) or letter (in writing), whether vowel or consonant, is by definition unique: there can be only one. The only sense I can make of this expression is as a copy-and-paste error for "first vowel or consonant" or "initial vowel or consonant". In this context, referring to print rather than speech, "vowel or consonant" is equivalent to "letter". Furthermore, "the pattern of English dictionaries" at this broad level of detail is determined by the spelling of the entire word and is generally called alphabetical order. I am revising the sentence accordingly.

--Thnidu (talk) 17:46, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

History
I love how elaborate this article is, but it certainly isn't complete. The history section is a bit meagre. It barely tells us what happened before the invention of the current orthography in 1937. Its written history must be longer. It was probably occasionally written in colonial times and in the days of white expansion into the region, and these records probably give a clue about how the language evolved in these days. Also: there's nothing about dialects. Is Navajo so uniform? Steinbach (talk) 13:04, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
 * AFAICS, there are no Spanish sources. Documentiation sets in with the work of the Franciscan Fathers in 1910, as described by Gladys A. Reichard in her Navajo Grammar. Reichard has also written about dialect variation, I'm still looking for more recent sources. –Austronesier (talk) 13:47, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
 * @Steinbach In regards to dialect: Robert Young did note regional differences when he was documenting the language for the BIA, but they left many of these differences out in dictionaries and primers. Obviously there were speakers that continued using regionalisms, but the version of Navajo that is taught in schools seems to be more uniform. Here's an (unfortunately paywalled) source on this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0271530911000346. Abitowlish (talk) 02:11, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: ANTH473 INLG480 Living Languages
— Assignment last updated by Ken1380 (talk) 22:27, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

"Anthropologists were frustrated by Navajo's having several sounds that are not found in English and lack of other sounds that are"
That's an odd way of describing things. If the 'anthropologist' approaches the problem armed with linguistic knowledge, including a knowledge IPA, no such problem arises. However, I suspect that many of the people that this refers to were 'accidental anthropologists' who primarily were, e.g., missionaries, educators, prospectors, recruiters and so on - people who may also have been unprepared for the challenges of romanisation, labouring under the misconception that the English alphabet is how you mark down speech sounds. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:FD08:A0C2:B5CA:3C74 (talk) 16:01, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

What does it mean?
The article claims that Navajo "is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages and is most widely spoken north of the Mexico–United States border". This does not make sense. The article nowhere suggets it is spoken south of the border, so it is not "most widely spoken" to the north, but only spoken there. I interpreted this a mistake, believing that the definite article was missing. If that is wrong, then what is the sentence trying to say? It cannot mean that is also "one of" the most widely spoken north of the Mexico–United States border, since that is already implied by the first part of the sentence. According to the table at Indigenous languages of the Americas, it is the most widely spoken indigenous languge north of the Mexico–United States border. Please restore my edit. 174.92.133.129 (talk) 22:58, 1 June 2023 (UTC)


 * You don't need me to restore your edit for you, but I don't understand your argument. The sentence says two things: (a) Navajo is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages, and (b) Navajo is most widely spoken north of the Mexico/U.S. border (as opposed to south of it). There is nothing irrational about that. What does the source say? Follow the cited source. -  Julietdeltalima   (talk)  23:16, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Not irrational, but would have made less sense and have been an oddly constructed sentence. It was in fact an error, and someone had deleted the 'the' that had originally been there. Fixed.2404:4408:6A6F:300:BC2F:84E5:BF8C:E8A8 (talk) 12:51, 4 April 2024 (UTC)