The Navajo language featured in "Windtalkers," the new movie about World War II code talkers scheduled to open June 14, is spoken by an increasingly small number of people, says a Swarthmore College lingustics professor.
"Navajo is very much a living language, but it is severely threatened," says Ted Fernald, an associate professor of linguistics who teaches classes on the use of cryptography and the Navajo Code, as well as Navajo linguistics. "More people by far speak Navajo than any other Indian language in the country. But in 1991, only 45 percent of Navajo preschoolers could speak it, a huge drop from the 80 percent in the 1970s."
Information about the code talkers was classified until 1968, and their accomplishments were largely ignored. According to Fernald, they used a combination of code -- substituting one word for another, such as "sweet potato" for "hand grenade" or "bird" for "airplane" -- and cipher -- replacing sounds or letters with something else, as in "delta" for the letter "d."
"In contrast, ordinary military code has lots of numbers and you need a book to decipher it," Fernald says. "Navajo does in one word what it takes English a whole phrase to do. Its speed meant messages could get through much more quickly than a traditional code. That, and that only a few people in the U.S. studied it back then, are what made it so valuable."
Fernald is a founding member and currently vice chair of the Navajo Language Academy, which sponsors an annual conference on Navajo language research and education. He has spent parts of every summer since 1996 on the Navajo reservation.
Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college with an enrollment of 1,450. Swarthmore is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.
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