Hi everyone, my name is Julie and today we're traveling to the Wild West
to the borderless grasslands of North America. We're going to explore the language of the people
who lived here long before Europeans arrived
Yá'át'ééh and welcome to the Navajo language
I have to admit it – Navajo was so far the most difficult language I've researched on
because it is so different from anything else
It is spoken in North America, in the Southwest of the US
especially in the Navajo Nation, which is a Navajo reservation
occupying portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico
The number of speakers counts around 170 000 people and it is the most widespread Native American language
above the US-Mexican border
How did this language end up where it is today? Let's discuss it in the history section
Studying Native American languages is a little bit tricky
Here is the map of different language families present there
As you can see there is a huge diversity, and languages are so different from each other and under-researched
that it is difficult to group together most of them
But with Navajo however there is hope
It belongs to the Apachean group of languages spread around the southwest United States
and form a part of the Athabascan family
With couple of more languages added to it it forms a larger
but already sometimes disputed Na-Dene family
The name "Na-Dene" comes from the common cognates within all the languages of this family
"Dene" or [dene] stands for "people"
and "na" is a prefix which means the same thing so "people people language group"
And by the way we see this term "dene" in the name of the Navajo language itself
Navajo people call their language Diné bizaad, translating as "people's language"
The term "navajo" comes from "navahu", which in the Tewa language
which is a language group of Pueblo Native Americans
means a large area of cultivated lands
but back to the map
The American continent was the last one to be discovered by humans
There were multiple migration waves, and I'm not going to talk about the European migration
because that's a completely different story
The earlier migrations happened through the Bering strait which used to have a land bridge
With Na-Dene arriving around 6 to 4 000 BC
If we think about it, Native Americans came from Eurasia
and their languages could still have some distant relatives that remained there
for example there's been a research which connects Na-Dene with Yeniseian languages
which is a small isolated language family in the middle of Siberia with just a handful of speakers remaining
Some other pieces of research have found correlations between Na-Dene and Sino-Tibetan languages
Finally there is even a Sino-Caucasian macro family theory which looks at the big picture
at the very big picture
and claims that there is a distant relationship between Basque,
Northern Caucasus languages, Burushaski, Yeniseian, Sino-tibetan and Na-Dene
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Apachean branch of Athabascan people migrated to Southwest US around 1400 AD
According to the Navajo mythology their homeland or Dinétah, which means "among the people"
lies between four sacred mountains, representing four cardinal points and four colours
This territory seems a bit larger than the current reservation area
and I wonder what could have happened
This is a tragic story of a series of conflicts between the Navajos and US army
which resulted in the famous Long Walk, which was a mass deportation of the Navajos from their homeland
In 1868 however a treaty was signed that granted Navajos a protected reservation territory and they set on a long walk back
Subsequently years of decline of the Navajo language started
Navajo and some other Native American languages left its mark in the recent history with the code talkers
Because their languages were undocumented and so different from anything else
there was no way to decode the messages
And now it's time to see how this secret language is actually pronounced
Navajo uses the latin alphabet. Let's try to decipher it step by step
starting with the consonants. There are 32 of them which are written
as a simple letter or a digraph or like this. Yeah this is a separate letter which stands for the glottal stop
In English we sometimes make this sound in some exclamations like "oh-oh"
Navajo uses this sound extensively and it can be found anywhere in a word
Most of consonant sounds come in three versions: non-aspirated, aspirated and glottal
Lastly, one of the most unusual consonant sounds could be this slash L
which is pronounced by putting tongue in the position of pronouncing the normal L
and pushing the air from the sides of the mouth
I always thought it was a rare sound but in my video-making experience I already encountered
two languages that had this sound: Zulu and Welsh. And i'm sure that there are more
T slash L will make [tl] sound and T slash L-glottal will result in almost a kind of a click
Now vowels. Anything you can think of that would
complicate your life with vowels is present in Navajo
There are four base vowel sounds
that come in a longer version and all of these can come in the nasalized version
On top of this this are four tones: high, low, rising and falling
By default vowels are in a low tone. By adding an acute accent to it we get a high tone
See the difference between "nizaad" and "nízaad"
Only long vowels can have rising or falling tone. To show it, one of the two vowels is marked by an acute accent
And now just try combining nasalisation and tone and glottal stops
That might need some practice to master. Let's hear how the native speakers do it
In terms of pronunciation at least for me it's a challenging language, but how about its grammar?
Bad news, with the grammar it doesn't get easier at all. Let's begin with the word order
It's SOV, subject object verb, everything seems all right. But with the nouns it's not all that straightforward
All the nouns in Navajo are clustered into specific classes depending on their status
and the higher ranking noun just cannot go in a sentence after a lower ranking noun, no way
These classes are in the following order: supernatural beings, humans, large animals (that also include children)
small animals and inanimate objects
So "The girl was pecked by the bird" is the correct way of saying but not "The bird pecked the girl"
However, the noun is not the main thing. The verb is the king
In Navajo a verb can form a complete sentence as it transmits almost all the information
including number, of which there are three: singular, plural and dual
person, of which there are four, fourth person is for some abstract or distant objects or people
The verb can also express notions for which in English adjectives are used
For example there is a verb that means "to be large"
And loads of nouns are derived from verbs
For example clock is derived from the word which means "it is moved slowly in a circle"
And then when we want to conjugate these verbs
There are not really tenses as we know them in English but there are 7 modes 12 aspects and 10 sub-aspects
Modes show the relation towards what is happening, aspects indicate temporal context
and sub-aspects add a secondary temporal context
If that wasn't enough, the meaning of the verb is refined by multiple available prefixes and suffixes
and you could even put 10 prefixes in one word
And if you still want more complications
If you want to give some hay you would use the verb "níljool" but if you're giving a cigarette you would use "nítiih"
The verb of your choice depends on the shape of the object you're giving and Navajo distinguishes between 11 shapes
This logic concerns all of the so-called handling verbs like "take", "throw", "fall"
And if you're still not lost in all of that already then let's look at the vocabulary
English did not really adopt words from Navajo
But well, Navajo did not really adopt words from English neither
Most of its vocabulary is from Athabascan origins and I know I've spoken of several languages
that prefer to create their new words instead of adopting foreign words for example Latvian or Welsh
But believe me, this is another level
Navajo not only creates their own new words for new technological terms like phones or planes
Here is the map of the United States with state names in Navajo
And a better one: this is a map of Europe with country names in Navajo
I especially like France – moustache-people land, very poetic
And if you want to introduce yourself in Navajo you can't just get away by saying your name and surname
You say your name, your mother's clan, your father's clan, your mother's father's clan and your father's father's clan
many clans
So the whole introduction sounds like this
If two people have one of these clans in common they know they're somehow related
and yeah every person is considered to belong to their mother's clan
So it's a kind of a matriarchy out there which is interesting
Navajo overall is very interesting and very unusual. One of the most unusual languages i've explored so far
Share your thoughts about this language in the comments. Like the video if you enjoyed it
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Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye