Bilingual Navajo : Mixed codes, bilingualism and language maintenance

Many American Indian Languages today are spoken by fewer than one hundred people, yet Navajo is still spoken by over 100,000 people and has maintained regional as well as formal and informal dialects. However, the language is changing. While the Navajo population is gradually shifting from Navajo toward English, the “tip” in the shift has not yet occurred, and enormous efforts are being made in Navajoland to slow the language’s decline. One symptom in this process of shift is the fact that many young people on the Reservation now speak a non-standard variety of Navajo called “Bilingual Navajo.” This non-standard variety of Navajo is the linguistic result of the contact between speakers of English and speakers of Navajo. Similar to Michif, as described by Bakker and Papen (1988, 1994, 1997) and Media Lengua, as described by Muysken (1994, 1997, 2000), Bilingual Navajo has the structure of an American Indian language with parts of its lexicon from a European language. “Bilingual mixed languages” are defined by Winford (2003) as languages created in a bilingual speech community with the grammar of one language and the lexicon of another. My intention is to place Bilingual Navajo into the historical and theoretical framework of the bilingual mixed language, and to explain how this language can be used in the Navajo speech community to help maintain the Navajo language. Many young people who have difficulty with Standard Navajo are quite fluent in this mixed variety. It may be heard more on the urban edges of the Navajo Nation than in the rural center. Although this is not the most favored variety of Navajo to be heard in the Navajo Nation today, the social evaluation of Bilingual Navajo is improving, and it can be seen it as a tool for maintaining the Navajo language