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Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
The tonal Navajo language differentiates words based on pitch and makes Spanish conjugation look like child’s play.
Both Navajo and Apache belong to a language family called Athabaskan, which, providing evidence for their geographic origin, is also spoken by native tribes in Yukon, Alaska, and British Columbia. linguists Robert W. Young and William Morgan as a “hopeless maze of irregularities,” its unique grammar, syntax, and tonal pronunciation are so indecipherable to outsiders that, during the Second World War, the U.S. Marines used Navajo as a form of military code. Saving the Navajo language is easier said than done, as this not only requires the implementation of bilingual schooling but also, as the above responses show, a reconsideration of the way Native American children perceive themselves in relation to their white peers, and vice versa.
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