Who Are The Navajos

Who are the Navajos? They are the Native American people of what is now the southwestern United States. They call themselves the Dine, and their land Dinetah. They Navajo live in a log or stone Hogan, and they are a very family oriented people. With currently about 148,500 speakers, the Navajo language is “widely credited as being the strongest of the indigenous languages of the United States” (UCLA). The Navajos of today have a much better social life than they did in all the years before World War II. The Navajo were long discriminated by the white settlers who pushed them off their land. At mission schools and in the streets, they were told that Navajos were useless and stupid. Restaurants would refuse to serve them. The discriminated
His parents were Christian missionaries on a Navajo reservation. Because he grew up around Navajo culture and language, he came to learn Navajo and practice Navajo customs. He decided to give the Marine Corps the idea of using Navajo as a code. The Native American language Choctaw had been used in World War I, but “after the war Germany and Japan had sent students to the United States to learn Native American languages should their enemies use it in a future war” (CIA). Because of this, many officials were uneasy about using Navajo, a Native American language, as a code. But Johnston insisted that the Navajo language was not learned by Japan and Germany because of its difficulty. It is a very complex language and hard to learn. Though written in a Latin alphabet, the language is difficult because of the frequent use of the apostrophe which calls for glottal stop. Glottal stop is used to make a sound by obstructing airflow through the throat. This creates a choppy sound in the words. The pronunciation is thus difficult, and there are 33 consonants and 12 vowel sounds in
“When a Navajo code talker received a message in code, he would hear what seemed to be a string of unrelated Navajo words” (NMCCC). Starting with the first Navajo word, he would translate it to its English equivalent. The first letter of the English equivalent was the first letter of the first word of the coded message. Because the Marines did not want to allow the Japanese to be able to crack their codes by seeing or hearing repeated words, any of 17 designated different Navajo words would stand for one letter. As an example, the coded way to say Saipan could have been the Navajo words for: sea – animal – island – pot – ant - nest.
In addition, frequently used military terms had designated Navajo words for them so that a code talker would not have to spell these out. There were 450 of these words. For example, fighter plane in code was the Navajo word for hummingbird (NMCCC). By combining the Navajo code with designated Navajo words for military terms, officials hoped that they had finally developed an unbreakable