Navajo Language

Native American · language · Southwest USA · living language

Spoken in the Southwest. Navajo is primarily spoken by people in the Navajo Nation and surrounding areas of the American Southwest. It remains one of the most vibrant Native American languages today.

Hundreds of thousands speak it. As of 2011, almost 170,000 Americans spoke Navajo at home, making it the most widely spoken Native American language north of the Mexico-United States border.

Part of a language family. Navajo belongs to the Southern Athabaskan language group, which is part of the larger Na-Dené family. This family includes languages spoken across western North America.

Still growing and changing. Unlike many endangered languages, Navajo continues to be actively spoken and passed down to new generations, helping keep the language alive and evolving.