The Navajo language is spoken by the Navajo people who live in the Navajo Nation, located in Arizona and New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The Navajo language belongs to the Southern, or Apachean, branch of the Athabaskan language family. Athabaskan languages are closely related by their shared morphological structure; these languages have a productive and extensive inflectional morphology. The Northern Athabaskan languages are primarily spoken by people indigenous to the sub-artic stretches of North America. Related Apachean languages are the Athabaskan languages of the Southwest: Chiricahua, Jicarilla, White Mountain and Mescalero Apache. While many other languages, like English, have benefited from decades of research on their sound and speech systems, instrumental analyses of indigenous languages are relatively rare. There is a great deal ofwork to do before a chapter on the acoustics of Navajo comparable to the standard acoustic description of English can be produced. The kind of detailed phonetic description required, for instance, to synthesize natural sounding speech, or to provide a background for clinical studies in a language is well beyond the scope of a single study, but it is necessary to begin this greater work with a fundamental description of the sounds and supra-segmental structure of the language. Inkeeping with this, the goal of this project is to provide a baseline description of the phonetic structure of Navajo, as it is spoken on the Navajo reservation today, to provide a foundation for further work on the language.

The Navajo sound system: vowels and consonants.

In this ethnography of Navajo (Diné) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music’s connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Diné make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.

Meet Oz . . . he's got a talent for trouble but his heart's always in the right place (well, nearly always). Uprooted from his friends and former life, Oz finds himself stranded in the sleepy village of Slowleigh. When a joke backfires on the first day at his new school, Oz attracts the attention of Isobel Skinner, the school psycho - but that's just the beginning. After causing an accident that puts his mum in hospital, Oz isn't exactly popular at home either. His older sister's nohelp, but then she's got a problem of her own . . . one that's growing bigger by the day. Oz knows he's got to put things right, but life isn't that simple, especially when the only people still talking to you are a hobbit-obsessed kid and a voice in your own head! Packed with action, heart and humour, Waiting for Gonzo takes you for a white-knuckle ride on the Wheel of Destiny as it careers out of control down the Hillside of Inevitability. The question is, do you go down laughing? Or grit your teeth and jump off?

Provides a summary description of the Navajo language and a detailed treatment of the inflectional morphology of its verb system.

This book is a source of vocabulary and grammatical information that is indispensable for teachers and students of the Navajo language. It includes the Navajo sound system and an outline of Navajo grammar. The work presented is also composed of a two part dictionary: Navajo - English and English - Navajo.