Navajo most popular Native American language

Source: abcnews.go.com

The latest US Census Bureau figures show that even during a time when so many Native American tribes are struggling to retain their native tongues, 169,000 people speak Navajo at home, more than any other Native American language.

However, these figures may be easy to misinterpet.

From the article:

Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.

“Navajo has the largest population, they say, of Native speakers, but it also has the largest population of non-speakers,” she said Wednesday. “And it kind of presents a skewed picture.”

The figure is based on five-year estimates from community surveys that allowed the Census for the first time to study small segments of the U.S. population. The Census found in a study released this month that fewer than a half-million people age 5 and over speak a Native American language at home. About 65 percent of them are in nine counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Alaska.

The surveys don’t gauge the level of fluency but ask whether a language other than English is spoken at home. If so, respondents are asked to write something in that language.