Southern Athabaskan languages

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 24. Chapters: Navajo language, Code talker, Navajo phonology, Southern Athabascan grammar, Lipan Apache people, Jicarilla language, Mescalero-Chiricahua language, Lipan language, KMYN, Tonto Apache people, Western Apache language, Berard Haile, Plains Apache language, Navajo Language Academy. Excerpt: Navajo or Navaho (native name: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock) spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages (the majority of Athabaskan languages are spoken in northwest Canada and Alaska). Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the U.S.-Mexico border, with 170,717 self-reported speakers in 2007, and this number has increased with time. The American Community Survey of 2007 reported 170,717 speakers of Navajo, making it the only Native American language to warrant a separate line in the statistical tables. The majority of speakers live on the Navajo Nation. Of these, 2.9% were monolingual with no knowledge of English. The four metro- and micropolitan areas with the largest number of speakers were Farmington (16.5%), Gallup (12%), Flagstaff (10.3%), and Albuquerque (5.4%). A number of bilingual immersion schools operate within Navajo-speaking regions to preserve and promote usage of the language. The following table lists the consonants of Navajo in the standard orthography, followed by their pronunciation in IPA notation in brackets: In Navajo orthography, the letter represents two different sounds: it is pronounced when stem initial and when prefixal or stem/word final. However, when is preceded by it is always written as and never as so that it will not be confused with (e.g. "I'm turning around", but never ). The consonant is written as before front vowels and (where it is palatalized ), as before (where it is labialized ), and as before . The glottal stop is not written at the beginning of words. For , both the palatalization and labialization is represented in the orthography where is it written as for the palatalized variant and for the labialized variant. The orthography does not indicate the variants for the other consonants. Navajo has four basic vowel qualities: a, e, i and o. Each of these may occur either short or lon