MultiTree:

Name: Navajo Type: Language Alternate Names: Navaho; Diné Spoken in: USA Number of speakers: 149,000 (1990 census). 7,616 monolinguals. Ethnic population: 178,030 (2000 census) (Ethnologue) Number of speakers: 120000 (UNESCO) Number of speakers: 148530 (World Oral Literature Project) Code: nav Code Standard: ISO 639-3 Documentation: SIL Families: Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit (Eyak-Athabaskan, Na-Dene, Dene-Yeniseian) Parent Subgroup: Southern Athabaskan; Apachean; Apachean Athabaskan (apac) Brief Description: "Navajo is a well-established language within the Southern Athabaskan dialect complex. Some degree of mutual intelligibility exists between Navajo and the other emergent languages of the complex, in particular Western Apache, but hte Navajo and Apache communities have been politically and culturally distinct since at least the early eighteenth century. In 1990 an estimate 115,000 people living on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and northeastern New Mexico had fluency in Navajo, about 75 per cent of the reservation population, to which must be added a somewhat lower percentage of the 12,000 to 15,000 Navajos living off-reservation. A conservative estimate of the total number of fluent speakers in 1990 would be about 120,000. In 2001, although the population has increased the number of speakers is probably smaller. Until the Second World War Navajo was the universal language of communication on the reservation, and there are still several thousand elderly near-monolingual speakers. As late as 1981, 85 per cent of Navajo children acquired Navajo as their first language, but the percentage has declined rapidly in recent years and some surveys show it now to be as low as 25 per cent." Victor Golla, Atlas of the World's Languages 2007 pg. 19

Endangerment Status

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UNESCO Status: Vulnerable Ethnologue Status: Not listed Sutherland's Red List: Not listed