Navajo · Diné bizaad

About Navajo

Language family

Na-Dené, Athabaskan

Where it's spoken

The Navajo Nation across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah

Speakers

roughly 170,000 speakers, the most spoken Native American language in the US

Navajo belongs to the Athabaskan family, which stretches from Alaska and western Canada down through the Pacific Northwest to the Apache and Navajo homelands of the American Southwest — a striking geographic spread for a single language family. Its complex verb system, in which most grammatical information is packed into the verb rather than separate words, made it the basis for the Navajo Code Talkers' unbroken WWII military code. Tribal schools now teach it alongside English to keep fluency growing among younger generations.