With roughly 80,000 to 100,000 native speakers, Navajo is the largest native speech community in North America. But the language is generally not being passed on to the youngest generation. The Navajo Language Academy, a collaboration of dozens of linguists and educators from within and outside the Navajo community, is dedicated to furthering the documentation and use of Navajo. With National Science Foundation support, Theodore Fernald, Ellavina Perkins and Irene Silentman will run a collaborative workshop at the Academy to allow language teachers and linguists to support each other in their work. They will videotape and transcribe Navajo conversations on topics of language use in various social settings. These conversations will contribute to the development of a User's Guide to Navajo. The workshop will include courses on the structure of the verb, the study of pragmatics, how to teach verb forms to students, and a course in advanced topics in linguistics. Linguists from inside and outside the Navajo Nation will then be able to carry out analyses of Navajo grammar and language usage.
The collaboration between language teachers and linguists that this project supports will aid community efforts to strengthen the use of Navajo and maintain its rich linguistic and literary tradition. Given the complexity of verbal morphology in Navajo, the language teachers can benefit greatly from a clearer understanding of the workings of grammar. For the linguists, this workshop will provide data and insights into the use of Navajo, and formal linguistics can directly feed back into language teaching. The User's Guide to Navajo, and the accompanying videotapes and transcriptions, will serve the needs of both the scholarly and native speaker communities.
