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Most people have heard of the famous Navajo (or Diné) code talkers who used their traditional language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater of combat during World War II.
Type 2 code contained words that could be directly translated from English into Navajo, and the code talkers also developed a dictionary of 211 terms (later expanded to 411) for military words and names that didn’t originally exist in the Navajo language.
Who are the Navajo people of New Mexico?
Manuelito Clyde K.M. Kluckhohn Laura Gilpin Navajo, also spelled Navaho, second most populous of all Native American peoples in the United States, with some 300,000 individuals in the early 21st century, most of them living in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
What is the difference between the Navajo and the Apache?
While the peoples mentioned thus far all have very ancient roots in the Southwest, the Navajo and Apache are relative newcomers. The Navajo speak an Apachean language which is classified in the Athabaskan language family.
Conventional Marine Corps codes involved lengthy encoding and deciphering procedures using sophisticated electronic equipment. The Navajo code, relying on the sender’s and the receiver’s brains, mouths, and ears, was much faster. In training and in combat, code-talkers’ proficiency erased official distrust.
Often, especially when a Marine regiment was fighting alongside an Army unit, white soldiers mistook the Navajo for the enemy, nearly costing several code-talkers their lives. Sometimes GIs “captured” and interrogated Navajo.
Did you know the Cherokee and Comanche served as code talkers?
But did you know that there were at least 14 other Native nations, including the Cherokee and Comanche, that served as code talkers in both the Pacific and Europe during the war?