Navajo Language and Navajo Code Talkers

    As William Jazzie told us in his lecture, the Navajo language is a very complicated language and is, therefore, very difficult to learn. It has only four vowels, A, E, I, O, but each vowel can exist in up to 10 different intonations. If the intonation is changed, a word can assume a completely different meaning. The Navajo, who have a good sense of humor, often use this feature of their language to make puns. For a long time the language was only spoken, not written, as the various vowel intonations could not be expressed with normal English characters. Despite earlier attempts, it was not until 1939 that a standardized alphabet of the Navajo Language was developed.. In this alphabet, which is shown at right, the intonation of the vowels is indicated by adding diacritical marks above or below the character - or both. The mark above is like the acute accent; the mark below is similar to the cedilla "ç", however, the hook is open to the right. Even the four variations of a vowel (no diacritical mark, mark above, mark below, mark above and below) are not enough to indicate all possible intonations of a vowel. The problem is solved by using double vowels, each of which may or may not have diacritical marks. The consonants "n" and "l" also come with a modification, as shown. The text sample shown in the box at left with its English translation gives an idea how printed Navajo looks like (the sample is from the book "White Nose the Sheep Dog" by Marjorie Thomas). I think the sample proves convincingly, that Navajo is a difficult language. However, today a member of the Diné can even download a True Type Font version of the Navajo alphabet for use in his or her computer.

    When the war in the Pacific began after Pearl Harbor, it became apparent that the military was lacking a simple and safe encryption or coding system for secure radio communications, which could not be broken by the Japanese. Then somebody had an idea: it was estimated that at the time only about 30 non-indians had a command of the Navajo language, mainly missionaries or their children who had grown up on the reservation. There was little likelihood that any Japanese had ever learned this difficult language and would be able to understand it. May be the Navajo language could, therefore, be used as an unbreakable code for radio communications in the Pacific. This is how the story of the Navajo Code Talkers began.
    The Marine Corps recruited a number of Navajo for an experimental team to validate the idea. However, military communications require words that did not exist in the language, such as "machine gun", "submarine", and "radar". So, a code sheet was developed which substituted Navajo words for the necessary military terms. Few if any of the Navajo corpsmen could read Navajo words, however. The code sheet, therefore, had to be easily memorized: so "submarine" was represented by the Navajo words for "iron fish" and "machine gun" by "rapid fire gun".
    Military communications frequently require that words be spelled. In WW II the military used the phonetic spelling alphabet "Able Baker Charly Dog......". The code talkers used their own alphabet which used the Navajo words for "Ant Badger Cat Dog......". Now, the first thing a cryptanalyst or code breaker does is to count the frequency of the occurrence of letters. To confuse them, the vowels had more than one equivalent, "e", for example was "ear, elk or eye", and the code talkers were instructed to alternate the words. The Navajo Code Talker's Dictionary was, of course, classified and was not declassified until many years after the war. Anyhow, the Navajo Code Talkers were a full success: it was one of the few codes used by the Americans that was never compromised (broken) by the Japanese. Over fifty years after the end of WW II, of course, few of the original code talkers are still alive. We had the privilege of meeting one of them, John Kinsel Sr., a very lively gentleman in his eighties. He told us how, as a young man from the reservation, he first went for training in California and then to the Pacific theater. He also told us that each code talker in a forward position had a bodyguard assigned. There were rumors that the bodyguard was not only to protect the code talker, but that he also had instructions to prevent that the code talker ever was taken alive as a prisoner by the Japanese.
    In the movie Wind Talkers, released in June of 2002, Nicholas Cage plays the body guard for the code talker Ben Jahzee, who is played by Adam Beach, a member of the Canadian Saulteaux tribe (he played Victor Joseph in the 1998 movie "Smoke Signals").
    The situation with the Navajo language at the begin of WW II was unique - but a few years later, in 1943, a dictionary and grammar of the Navajo Language became available. If one searches for "navajo dictionary" at amazon.com one gets not fewer than 11 references to several Navajo-English dictionaries and language tapes - enough for any English speaker who really wants to learn how to understand Navajo. I am also sure that a Navajo-Russian dictionary exists, though it is not listed at amazon.com. It was a fluke that at the Diné College we noticed a young woman, who looked a bit different than the other Navajo students. She turned out to be a Japanese student. However, she was not studying the Navajo language, she was studying Navajo rug weaving.